Social Media vs. SEO for 2009

Now that we're in a new year, it is easy to see what the buzz was for 2008 in the online media world - Social Media.

As the presence of SEO has built over the years and now e Businesses are fully aware that in order to succeed they need to invest in SEO, there has been a lot of attention put onto the next stage of web development. Everyone should now be aware of what exactly Web 2.0 is and how the blogging world has made such an impact. What has been a much welcomed development in SEO has been the take off of blogs. This has given a whole new platform for which people can add to their online marketing strategy and one that has meant that anyone and everyone has a voice of opinion and can talk about what they want to. I have written before about the importance of businesses to have blogs and the value of communicating with your target audience and/or customers. This has developed in 2008 to Social Media.

Most people should now be aware of the networking behemoth that is Facebook - and if you're not where have you been hiding? Before Facecrap - Faceshite - Facebook (sorry), there was the creative MySpace, for the younger audience BeeBo and the much forgotten about MSN Live Spaces, all designed to bring people together and share content. They are now attracting more users than ever and a recent post about the rise of the networking sites really strikes home just how large it is. With over 55,000,000 visitors in December 2008 alone, you can see why social networking is dominating the online world.

Businesses that have observed this increase have already made a move to use Social Networking as part of their marketing mix. A sports coaching gap year company has used its target audience on Facebook ads to drive traffic as well as promoting their Facebook group with great effect. A company promoting quad biking in Nottingham have developed a YouTube channel to show off their activities. All this allows a business to showcase their brands where people can experience and share whats on offer.

The emphasis here is on the word 'share'. Sharing photos, sharing messages and events and more popular than ever now, sharing status updates. Also in the Mashable.com (ref. above) is the rise of microblogging. Twitter has seen a huge increase in popularity, 664% to be exact. For those who don't know what Twitter is check out my 'Tweets' on the right of this blog. Here you can update people with what you are doing any time of the day or night - even from your mobile phone. So once you have shared your status or interesting find on the web, what do you do? This brought about the next phase in social media - Social Bookmarking sites.

With the emphasis on sharing content between users, Social Bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious or Stumble Upon have soared in popularity and have found themselves attached to the footer of all blogs (just check the footer of this post for the bookmarking tools!). You can come across these even on the BBC news website, on YouTube or on a recipie website, all urging you to tell everyone you know about what you're reading/seeing.

This begs the question, in the future what is the role of the search engine going to be? In a separate post about the ways social media will change in 2009, this article mentions that social media is evolving to meet not only the needs of people but also to cross the different platforms. With mobile technology developing we are now increasing able to take our stumbles, status updates or blogs where ever we go.

So a change is on the horizon for SEO. This will definitely not see the end of SEO at all but more like an evolutionary step. Remember that search engines still need to make sense of the information out there. As Eric Schmidt famously quoted recently that the internet is a "Cesspool" where false information thrives, there still needs to be order out of chaos. That which needs to be indexed properly will still need to be optimised to make it appear. With the increased activity of businesses making use of social to promote their products or brands, there still remains a need for this to be structured.

This does mean that the overall nature of SEO will change but definitely for the good. The web is an evolving sphere of information and in order for people to embrace this, we all need to develop our strategies. I for one consider Social Media as already part of SEO.