This is the era of digitalization. And, do you think that any business could have shaped this digital era more than Google and Facebook?
In content marketing, when it comes to driving traffic to your site, there are a variety of ways.
However, the two primary methods are search engines and getting social. But, there are also some issues that come along with these two primary methods. The real conflict is whether to invest in one content marketing strategy more than the other.
And another option is to only seek one content marketing strategy and completely ignore the other one.
Google vs. Facebook – the struggle is real here. If you are new to the content marketing industry, you would surely end up getting confused about whether to focus on creating high-quality blogs or high-quality social media posts. To come up with a conclusion, we need to have a detailed analysis of both Google and Facebook.
How Search Engines Beats Social Media?
Here are some of the reasons why the search engine (Google) appears to be the winner when it comes to content marketing.
More audiences look for business on the search engine
You can check your own habits and realize this. Whenever you are looking for something, from a vehicle repair company to a fitness trainer, where do you go first? You are most likely to go to a search engine – Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc. An Econsultancy survey report stated that around 61% of consumers around the world use search engines to help them in product research before making a purchase. This means that if you want to your brand to get noticed, you will have to rank well for your targeted keywords.
Search Engine Helps You to Determine What People Are Looking for
When it comes to search engines, especially Google, you will have a lot of outstanding tools & techniques that you can use to find what people are searching for. Google AdWords Keyword Tool is one of the trending tools in this process. For example – Even though “dog foods” may not exactly have one million searches per month, you will know that “dog foods” is a more popular keyword phrase used on the search engine over “dog food” which comes in at only some thousand searches in a month.
You Can Buy Your Way Into the Search Result Pages
When it comes to search engines, another feature that you get to enjoy is that even if you fail to make it to the top of organic search results, you have the option of purchasing your way into the sponsored links section of Google through the popular tool – Google AdWords.
It is obvious that organic search results will end up getting more clicks, but still having a presence on the first page of Google is far better than having no presence at all.
How Social Media Beats Search Engines?
Now, let us go through the ways in which social media is likely to beat search engines and rank higher in the content marketing industry.
Recommendations come just through a ‘like’
The same report from Econsultancy had shown proof that around 75% of the young generation use recommendations on social media networks for making any purchasing decisions. The biggest plus point that social media networks consist of is their ‘like’ feature. When someone likes your business page, mentions your profile, or tag you in their posts then your page will be recommended to the people they are connected with. This will help your business to get discovered.
Social media enables you to respond to criticism quickly
The worst problem when it comes to search engine results is having something negative come up. Online reputation management is a thriving service that allows to clear up all the bad reviews and other negative articles about a business. And unfortunately, you can do nothing to counter these.
But when it comes to social media such as Facebook, whenever your business faces criticism on social media, you will get an opportunity to turn those complaints into compliments by responding back to them in real-time.
As a content marketer, you must know all the best strategies to do this as it helps current and potential customers realize how much you care about their satisfaction.
Buy Your Way in Front of Your Target Audience
There are various social media advertising tools like Facebook Advertising, StumbleUpon Ads, Promoted Tweets, and many other that helps businesses to put their content in front of the targeted social media audiences.
This is considered to be one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website, and followers for your Facebook page, and increase your brand’s visibility on various social media platforms.
Why should you choose to invest both in Google search engine and Facebook?
The points stated above may make you believe that one strategy is better than another. But there are also a lot of good reasons why you should invest your time, money, and effort into both of these content marketing strategies.
All the website owners use Google Analytics. You just need to look at it once and you yourself will find out the reason why you should use both social media marketing and search engine marketing for your business. Just check your top traffic sources and question yourself will your brand grow if you lost any one of these. And we bet the top 5 list would have both search engines and social media included.
When you are investing both on Google and Facebook, you are likely to enjoy a good balance of the traffic generated.
If you are a new digital marketer, you can take the help of any content marketing services and they will guide you with the best content marketing strategies to gain traffic through both Google and Facebook.
