Should Blogs focus on Social Media for Traffic and SEO?

Topic: Do you need Social Media for getting blog traffic and improving SEO?

• Why your Blog may not be able to drive traffic from social media?
• Organic Social Media Reach is limited, you will have to invest in Paid Ads.
• SEO and Social Media – Does Social Media Help you rank Higher?
• Social Media Strategy is different than Search Engine Strategy. 
• Social Media Success Needs a lot of effort.
• Social Media can distract you from your goals.

If you are starting a new blog or even if you started a blog a while back and looking for getting some serious traffic, I would suggest you ditch social media.

I started blogging back in 2013 and it is almost 6 years I have been writing blog posts and so far articles I have written are read by over 10 million people. 

I write on my primary blog Candytech.in daily, without fail and on some days I put in 8-10 hours. So now you know, the numbers I have quoted above are to make sure that you know the advice is not coming from an amateur blogger.  

Your Niche Matters for Social Media Success

A lot of people will advise you to focus on social media, create engaging content on social media like Facebook, follow trends on Instagram and Twitter and leverage the trending hashtags. 

But if you are not creating content that is viral in nature, social media is not the right strategy. 

If you have a blog like Buzzfeed, Scoopwoop or Boredpanda which is creating viral content, social media is your friend. 

But if you are writing about blogging or WordPress, SEO or How to do a server configuration, you are going to find it very difficult to get traffic from Social. 

Study of More than 50 FB pages – What I found out?

I have studied around 50 Facebook pages which are there for more than 2 years. There is a secret that I want to tell you that will make you spend your time where it should improve your odds of success.

Which Type of Content and Pages do Well on Facebook?

Pages that are posting viral/funny videos and posts are 10x more successful than pages that are posting boring but informational stuff.

Videos – Pages that post interesting/ witty videos do great on Facebook and even Twitter.

Facebook Failure

Just have a look at https://www.facebook.com/problogger/, FaceBook page. Darren Rowse Blog (Problogger) gets massive search traffic and has huge resources but on social media they get may 10-20 likes. The page has over 100,000 likes but the organic reach and engagement are nill. 

Do you have trouble sticking to your own publishing deadlines? A great way to discipline yourself is to offer to write…

ProBlogger ಅವರಿಂದ ಈ ದಿನದಂದು ಪೋಸ್ಟ್ ಮಾಡಲಾಗಿದೆ ಮಂಗಳವಾರ, ನವೆಂಬರ್ 5, 2019

FaceBook Success

On the other hand, https://www.facebook.com/Scoopwhoop/ has over 4.7 million followers and the page is growing. Posts can get even 10000 likes, 1000s of reshares and massive traffic from social. 

Such a bummer for mosquitoes.

ScoopWhoop ಅವರಿಂದ ಈ ದಿನದಂದು ಪೋಸ್ಟ್ ಮಾಡಲಾಗಿದೆ ಗುರುವಾರ, ಡಿಸೆಂಬರ್ 12, 2019

There are different types of content that work on social media and there are certain niches that don’t appeal to people. 

Say, I wrote a post on fixing Nginx Cache issue, do you think it will do well on social media? Or if I wrote about the new 53000 dollars iMac, will people would want to know more about it?

Nevertheless, even if your content is interesting, it is very hard nowadays to create a following on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Organic reach is 2-4% of your followers and social media giants want you to pay for the reach. 

Learn How to Do Email Marketing the Right Way – Comprehensive Guide

What About Twitter? 

Twitter will give you the best return if you are Tweeting about trending hashtags. Otherwise, engagement and traffic are not going to be significant.

Social Media Needs Time and Additional Effort.

Also, social media needs better images and titles to attract people, your SEO optimized post may not do well on social media. 

You need to either click or use more catchy images, follow the amount of text guidelines of Facebook and spend time on your images.

Also, your boring headlines won’t catch anyone’s attention, you need cheeky, sort of clickbait titles to get more clicks.

There is always a battle between writing an SEO optimized (with relevant keywords) headline or a clickbait social media headline. 

Social Media is a Big Distraction

For social success, you will have to constantly follow trends to leverage them instead of spending time on creating deep content. 

Also, I tend to drift once I am on social media. I waste a lot of time watching usual crap videos and all sorts of garbage. It happens with most of us.

Better to Leverage Google and Youtube 

But should you abandon social media and focus on just Google instead. No, not entirely. 

Google and Youtube are both great resources to drive traffic to your blog. 

See how bloggers like Neil Patel and Brian Dean (from Backlinko) are using Youtube to drive traffic. 

Youtube doesn’t only show your videos only your subscribers but also to people who search for that topic. If you can make a video that people can watch even 50%, you can drive insane traffic from Google to your blog.

 Creating Ever Green Vs Viral Content

Viral news type blog posts can drive high traffic for a short period of time and then you will need something new to drive traffic. On the other hand, evergreen long-form content can drive traffic for a long time and you can even update it improve your keyword rankings.

SEO and Social Media – Does Social Media Help you rank Higher?

The answer is no. I can share with you several examples of websites that have an abysmal social media presence, yet they are doing great on Google and have tons of traffic.

Can check igyaan.in and bestgadgetry.com one is a killer success on social while the other just drive traffic from Google without any social presence.

It doesn’t matter to Google actually, as long as you are satisfying the searcher’s intent.

Also, there are websites with over a million social followers but doing pathetic on Google.

Leveraging Social Media – Quick and Dirty Way

It is not a secret that you can drive a lot of traffic from Facebook or Twitter if you are willing to invest. If you are a serious blogger, I would recommend fixing a monthly budget for social media and start paid promotions. 

Rather than spending hours on social media to chase trends, create amazing articles that can do good in search. Use the same articles on social and do pay promotions, you can even use remarketing on FB Ads or Google Ads to drive traffic.

You Have Limited Time in A Day

You can spend your time on social media or spend the same time to create a website that people will type in browser and reach directly. 

There are several things on which you can invest time:

1. Design an amazing website. 
2. Make it super fast.
3. Use AMP. 
4. Create Quizzes and Polls.
5. Optimize Ads and Affiliate links.
6. Format Your Posts to improve readability.
7. Create an amazing email newsletter.
8. Create Videos about your popular content. 

If you still have time spend it on social media marketing. 

Also, Read:

How to Recover Website from Google Search Traffic Loss

How Big Websites are Exploiting Content Freshness By Updating Dates

Master These 10 Skills To Create An Incredibly Successful Blog