Tuesday 29 April 2014

Search Engine Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing: The Showdown

When it comes to driving traffic to your website, there are a variety of ways to get visitors. The primary two that individuals and businesses almost always have a struggle with investing their time and money into are search and social. Sometimes the issue is convincing people why these are a necessity for a thriving business. Other times, the conflict is whether to invest in one marketing strategy more than the other, or to only pursue one marketing strategy but not the other.

How Search Beats Social

First of all, let’s look at the reasons why you might want to choose search engine marketing over social media marketing.

More People Look for Business on Search

Think about your own habits. Whenever you are looking for something, from an air conditioning repair company to a zumba instructor, where do you go first? Most likely, you will go to a search engine – Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL, Blekko, or one of the many other options available.
A report by Econsultancy found that 61% of consumers use search engines to help them in product research before making a purchase. This means that if you want to get discovered, you will want to rank well for your target keywords.

Know What People Are Searching For

When it comes to search engines, while the numbers might not be exact, you have a lot of great tools to use in your research of what people are searching for. Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a great start in this process. While “pet supplies” may not actually get an exact one million searches per month, you will know that “pet supplies” is a more popular keyword phrase over “pet supply” that comes in at only 368,000 monthly searches.

Buy Your Way into the Results

If you can’t make it to the top of organic search results, you can always buy your way into the sponsored links section of Google using Google AdWords.


In a search for “printer ink,” two domains that are not in organic search results appear in the top two spots. Even though organic search results might get more clicks, having any presence on the first page is still better than having no presence at all.
The bonus of paid search listings is that you can customize your appearance in search results. Instead of your usual website’s title and description that is used in organic results, you can use something that calls out to a specific sale in sponsored results. As an example, the company ranking 2nd in organic search also shares its Cyber Monday sale in the sponsored listings to the right.

How Social Beats Search

Now, let’s take a look at where social media marketing meets or beats search engine marketing.

Peer Recommendations Happen with the Click of a Like

In the same report by Econsultancy mentioned earlier, they found that 75% of people in the 18 – 26 age group used recommendations on social sites in product research before making a purchase. One of the nice sides to social media is once you have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, peer recommendations will happen when someone likes your page, mentions your Twitter handle, or tags your brand name. When someone takes these actions, their connections will see them which may help your business get discovered by others with that perceived seal of approval.

Respond to Criticism in Real Time

One of the worst problems when it comes to search engine results, aside from not coming up in them at all, is having something negative come up. Online reputation management is a thriving service thanks to rip off reports, bad reviews, and other damaging articles about a business. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to counter these in search engine results themselves.
Whenever you are presented criticism on social media, however, you will have a chance to turn those complaints into compliments by responding back to them in real time. There is a lot of great information today, including books like The Now Revolution that help businesses learn how to plan for, find, and manage real-time crises in the social media space. Knowing how to do this is essential to showing current and potential customers how much you care about everyone’s satisfaction with your business.

Buy Your Way in Front of Your Target Audience

Thanks to Facebook Advertising, StumbleUpon Ads, Promoted Tweets, and other social media advertising, businesses can put their content in front of social media audiences. This is a great way to generate traffic to your website, fans for your Facebook page, and visibility for your messages on social media platforms.
Why You Should Choose to Invest in Both Search and Social
While the above mentioned points may make you believe that one strategy is better than another, there is one good reason you want to invest your time, money, and efforts into both search engine marketing and social media marketing. You simply don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket.
If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, go take a look at it now. Go to your Traffic Sources > Sources > All Traffic. Then look at your top five traffic sources and ask yourself what would you do if you lost one of them.

Take a moment to click on each traffic source to see the percentage of visitors that source drives to your website.

In my case, Google (40.1%), t.co (Twitter – 4.54%), StumbleUpon (3.2%), and Facebook (2.47%) are my top sources for the last 30 days. So I want to ask myself what I would do if I lost my Google traffic? That would be a loss of almost 10,000+ visitors in a month. Or if I lost my Twitter traffic, that would be a loss of 1,000+ visitors.
What you might find more interesting is using the Compare to past option under your date dropdown.

Now you can see, for the last 30 days vs. the 30 days in the previous month how your traffic is changing. In this comparison, I noticed that my search engine traffic dropped.

But my Twitter traffic increased.

While your numbers may vary, the one thing that is safe to say is that if you are investing your time in both search and social is that you’ll have a good balance of traffic. This means if one source began to fail, you could always boost your efforts in another area and know that you will not lose all of your visitors entirely.
Is it possible to lose one source of traffic completely? Of course! Imagine if 80% of your traffic was from Google, and your website was hit with the first Panda update that left top domains with a loss of 34% to 86% of their keyword positions in search. Without incoming traffic from other sources, you would be in some serious trouble!
Regardless of whether you fear the loss of your search engine traffic due to a penalty or loss of rankings to a competitor, or the loss of your social media traffic because of a misunderstanding that resulted in the removal of your Facebook page, fear should not be your only motivating factor in diversifying your marketing efforts between search and social. Did you know that search engine marketing can help you with your social media marketing, and vice versa?

How Search Engine Marketing Helps Social

Search engine optimization doesn’t just happen on your website. Did you know you can use the same keyword research and on-site optimization strategies that you use for your website’s search engine marketing campaign for your social media marketing?

Keyword Research for Social Media

Keyword usage is important in social media. Although you can’t find the specifics on how many people search for particular keywords on social media, you can use different tools to get a good idea. For example, if you want to know what to include in your Twitter profile’s bio, you can use Wefollow to see what keywords people tag themselves with.

You can also see what people search for in tweets using the suggestions on Topsy.

Using various methods like these will help you fine tune your status updates and bio information for search within social networks.

On-Site Optimization for Social Media

While On-Site normally just means on your own website, you can take the same principles for title tags, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and so forth to better optimize your social media profiles for search. For example, you can optimize Google+ for search…

Facebook pages…

Twitter profiles…

Almost all social media profiles have some customizable elements, whether it is your profile’s name, description, or image that can be tweaked for better search optimization. Just use tools like Google Chrome’s SEO Site Tools on your own social profiles when logged out of the network so you can see the public display version viewable by search engines.


Pay attention to the Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Img Tags, and H1 through H4 Tags to see which ones you can edit for better branding and keyword placement.

How Social Media Marketing Helps Search
So how can social media marketing help with your search engine results?

Better Reputation Management

Want to bump off a bad entry in the first page of search results for your brand, or pre-emptively create a strong brand presence in search so a negative results can’t barge its way in? Social media profiles are your answer. Social profiles that generally rank well for businesses include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, FourSquare, and LinkedIn. If the only online properties created by you appear on the first page when someone searches for your brand name, then you are well on your way to creating a great first impression.

Confirm a Search Result is Trustworthy

While, as mentioned earlier, almost two thirds of consumers research products before buying them through search engines, I’d bet that the social media savvy ones will check out the top results (aka you and your competitors) on social media. I know that, when I come across a new company that I haven’t heard of, I will also go check out their Facebook page and Twitter account to see if they are active in their customer service. This means I want to see some recent status updates and replies to customers asking questions whenever possible.

When it comes to search engine marketing vs. social media marketing, which one do you put the majority of your energy towards? What ways do you think one is better than the other, and what ways do you see one helping the other?

For more details visit our website http://www.arinesolutions.com
Our facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/ArineSolutions
Our LinkedIn Page : http://www.linkedin.com/company/arine-solutions
Our Twitter Page : https://twitter.com/ArineSolutions
Our Google+ Page : https://plus.google.com/+Arinesolutions

Facebook Vs Google pros and cons

Facebook vs. GoogleAs the battle of Facebook vs. Google rages on, it can often be difficult for advertisers to decide where they should focus their attention.
Advertising and creating a brand presence on Facebook has different advantages and requires a different approach than advertising on Google AdWords.

Google AdWords Vs. Facebook Ads: Which Is Better For Your Business?

Ideally, you’ll want to implement both Facebook advertising and Google advertising. While there are a number of similarities between advertising on Facebook and advertising on Google, there are some major differences as well.

Facebook Vs. Google Advertising: Similarities

Both Google and Facebook have a massive potential audience, and they both are primarily PPC advertising channels.
Facebook and Google each offer paid advertising models in addition to free online marketing tools like Facebook Fan Pages and Google+ Business Pages. These pages don’t require the marketer to pay, but are still great venues for promoting your brand and products.
The key difference for advertisers to understand between Facebook and Google lies in your purpose—are you trying to promote knowledge of your brand, or sell a specific product?

Facebook Vs. Google Advertising: Differences

Facebook sessions usually tend to last much longer than a normal Google search session, which would make Facebook preferred for building brand awareness or sending a specific message.
Facebook also allows advertisers some unique targeting options such as creating a message specifically crafted for fans of Arrested Development, or for college alumni groups.
Facebook vs. Google AdvertisingWhich is better for advertising, Facebook or Google? Check out our Facebook vs. Google Display Advertising infographic.
Our research shows that Google is the better choice for display advertising because it has superior CPC performance, improved ad targeting options, and an enormous array of ad formats that Facebook lacks. Ideally, it's best to try both and discover which fits best with your brand.

Facebook Vs. Google Plus: Why Google+ Grows In Value

While Facebook still has the advantage in terms of intimate data concerning favorite movies, books, TV shows, etc for advertisers to use, Google plans on giving Facebook a run for its money with Google+. Google+ allows Google to also collect more personal user data, and with users staying logged in to their Google account as they check email, use Google+, and surf the web, it can be expected that Google’s user data will soon surmount Facebook in terms of value.    
Google also has the advantage when it comes to web searches, which the search engine giant is known for. Google AdWords is the ideal venue for business looking to drive clicks and conversions for specific products; Google searchers often have a specific intent in mind, while users often go to Facebook simply to hang out and chat with friends.
Facebook vs. Google AdvertisingFacebook gives businesses a way to connect with users on a social, personal level in and intimate and friendly space, whereas Google is what people use when they are looking for something specific, and often looking to make a purchase.
Facebook's click-through-rates can be as much as 1,000 times lower than Google campaigns with the same intent.
 While Facebook offers traditional ad displays, Google ads offer a number of different advertising options such as the Google Display Network. Google AdWords offers geo-targeting and other additional features and functions.
One powerful advertising option that Google offers that Facebook does not is remarketing. Google remarketing, also known as retargeting, involves showing ads to users based on their past web activity on your site. Remarketing allows advertisers to follow users and show ads to them across Google’s large network of partner sites on the Google Display Network. This pales in comparison to Facebook, whose ads only show up on its own site.
Bottom line: While businesses will definitely want to take advantage of Facebook for developing brand awareness and developing messages for specific niche interests, Google is the venue to focus on for advertising because of its wide array of advertising features and numerous options.
Google+ integration has also enabled Google to begin collecting the same kind of personal data that Facebook has long been coveted for.

WordStream Makes Advertising On Google Easy

The only problem with advertising on Google is that small businesses are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of options available to Google advertisers. WordStream was created to fulfill that need; specifically, to help small businesses manage their Google AdWords account in an efficient and easy manner.
Discover how WordStream’s PPC Advisor software can help optimize your PPC campaigns and boost your business—try it free today!

Facebook Vs. Google Traffic

While Facebook tends to get more traffic than Google+, Google plus is the site to focus on when it comes to driving traffic to your business.
facebook vs. google plus trafficWordStream conducted a Facebook vs. Google Plus research project in which we measured which social media site drove the most traffic to our site. We then illustrated our results in the Social Media Showdown:  Facebook vs. Google+ Infographic.
The results of the Social Media Showdown are as follows:

1st Place: Facebook with 47.26% of visitors
2nd Place: Twitter with 27.51% of visitors
3rd Place: Google+ with 15.42% of visitors
4th Place: LinkedIn with 9.81% of visitors
While Facebook took 1st place for driving traffic to our site, this study was conducted when Google+ was only one month old. With Google+ at this point driving more traffic than LinkedIn, it was clear even then that Google plus was an important social media network to focus on. This was happening when we did not even have a WordStream Google+ page or Google+ buttons on our site!

Facebook Vs. Google+ Privacy

Privacy online continues to be a growing issue for internet users. How do Facebook and Google compared in terms of privacy? Check out our Internet Privacy Infographic, which compares Facebook vs. Google Plus privacy policies and settings.
Facebook default privacyFacebook has long been demonized for altering users’ default privacy setting, resulting in users sharing more private information than they initially realized. Google hasn’t fared much better, receiving heavy criticism for combining the separate privacy policies for each of Google’s services into one, all encompassing new Google privacy policy.
While Google’s new privacy policy doesn’t allow Google to collect more information about users than before, Google is now allowed to do more with that private information collected across different Google services.  While many users are less than thrilled with these developments, the new uses of data are exciting for advertisers, who will be able to use this personal data to create more targeted ads for specific user audiences.


For more details visit our website http://www.arinesolutions.com
Our facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/ArineSolutions
Our LinkedIn Page : http://www.linkedin.com/company/arine-solutions
Our Twitter Page : https://twitter.com/ArineSolutions
Our Google+ Page : https://plus.google.com/+Arinesolutions

Friday 25 April 2014

The Future of Digital Marketing

The marketing arena is poised to witness a major shift and change with regards to consumer behaviour and market trends.

There was a time when we used to just look at one medium and one mode to connect with the audience but now it is the user who is the decision maker and who gets to choose in which medium he feels comfortable interacting with the brand.

Use of Data:

Data will be playing a major role across all the verticals. Marketers now have access to real time data where they get to know how a user views their ad, comes to their site and compares the products or services with others, all this can be monitored until the user completes the transaction.



There are a lot of factors which marketers were missing i.e. not taking social interactions to the cross channel data, which offer huge potential. We need to develop a system which would integrate all the data sources providing valuable insights not only from the brand perspective but to also gain better customer insights.

Multi-Screen Marketing:

The evolution of second screen has begun. More and more consumers use multiple screens to browse, research, compare and buy.

We need to understand the mediums and we should start serving tailor made messages according to the screen and medium the user is searching for the products/services on. The companies need to adapt as soon as possible before it is too late.

No More selling, need of the hour is helping:

Marketers need to understand that the users have evolved more than ever before. More selling will just force the user to bounce off the brand rather than helping him to engage. We need to focus on creating brand awareness and helping the user with the product/service he is interested in. We need to start focusing more on the engagement aspect.





For more details visit our website http://www.arinesolutions.com
Our facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/ArineSolutions
Our LinkedIn Page : http://www.linkedin.com/company/arine-solutions
Our Twitter Page : https://twitter.com/ArineSolutions
Our Google+ Page : https://plus.google.com/+Arinesolutions