Web 2.0 – The concept and its controversial name keeps coming back from the past to haunt us, no matter how hard we try to push it to the back of our minds. For some people, even a hint of this term would make their blood boil to the point of evaporation (not literally), while for most of us (including me) it puts a smile on our faces. The reason behind this smile is the fact that this epoch is more flexible and has opened an all new world for us.
The dawn of web 2.0 has heralded a new era, an era of social media websites that come in different guises. The era is witnessing the World Wide Web graduated from being a passive element to being a dynamic component of our lives. This transformation is characterized by user generated media (UGM), more commonly referred to as social media. This multi facet media of content sharing, social bookmarking and collaborative websites is playing a pivotal role in loosening the shackles of search engines.
In the past, businesses and individuals relied heavily on search engines for promoting their business online and to attract visitors. However search engines have some inherent flaws which makes it difficult to achieve these objectives. The major obstacles being that search engine results cannot be updated instantly and the traffic is keyword based, hence sometimes very difficult to compete. Also, search engine crawlers and algorithms are used to rate the content and thus the value given to user content (which might be great) is sometimes inappropriate. To make things worse, the links (votes) pointing to your website do not carry equal weight in the eyes of search engines.
On the contrary, social media is more like an online democracy - every vote counts. The huge online community is actively using this medium to share and vote for content. The more votes you get the more popular you are and it eventually translates into visitors. Building a profile which is recognized as an authentic source of information is the key to unlocking the potential of social media. Your submissions would carry a greater value to that of contributions made by newbies.
The online marketing professionals are gung- ho/exuberant about social media optimizations marketing and they have legitimate reasons to do so. From pushing negative links out of the top results to getting hassle free back links, social media can be leveraged for multi facet benefits, interchangeably. The power of influence required to accomplish these tasks is a ramification of the content that you submit to these sites. A blast from the past – Content is still the king.
The ultimate goal of online marketing is to get visitors and this can be achieved by using the 'linking' power of social media. By being able to suffice this rudimentary goal of online marketing, social media marketing has stolen the 'thunder' of search engine optimization. This does not mean that search engine optimization is obsolete. Social media has just created a new avenue for promoting business and should be used judiciously. Search engine optimization and social media marketing complement each other, and if done in tandem would deliver fantastic results.
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