Social Marketing Takes So Long – Can It Be Affordable? SEO Companies Say ‘Yes!’

When you talk about affordable SEO, you have to talk about it in terms of effect per time spent. You generally pay an SEO company for a block of time, after all, and they do whatever they can in that timeframe (according to the plans that they draw up at the interview) to get your site ranked. Almost all of a standard SEO company’s arsenal is custom-picked because the techniques they apply give the best boom for the least amount of strokes on the keyboard.

So what do you make, then, of social marketing? It’s certainly not anything like backlink building — social networking, social bookmarking, social gaming, all of them are designed not to elicit a specific link (though some do), but rather to elicit a response from a nebulous crowd of Internet onlookers. You socially market and you hope that you do it well enough that people plus/like/thumbs-up you en masse.

But it takes a lot of attention, content, and sheer time in order to get the Internet’s attention. There’s almost no way a small business can keep up with all of the ideas, requests, complaints, compliments, and other fanmail you’ll get if you go social. So who does have the time to do social marketing?

Your SEO company, of course. They’re already out there marketing for you passively — creating content with your name on it, putting your company’s face in places you’d never think of, and so on. Social marketing is nothing more than a logical extension of traditional SEO. Just instead of building your company’s reputation in the eyes of Google, they’re building it in the eyes of the people that matter most — your customer base.

So how do you know if social marketing is worth your investment? The same way you do with SEO. There’s no really solid RoI measurement for organic SEO, either — you put in the money, and through a very complex and chaotic process, that investment turns into traffic that you turn into money. Social marketing is exactly the same way, except the chaotic part is a different process.

In short, it becomes ‘affordable’ at the point when it starts to produce sales — and it will.