Will Social Media Compete Search Engines?
The topic that I choose to write on for today’s article is “Search Vs. Social Media”. For many readers, they would be thinking me crazy for comparing the two. The terms that I have compared are two different things. But frankly speaking the growth that I have seen of social media in the past few years is unimaginable. And still there is no sign of them stopping and they are still growing with huge number of users joining one or the other social media everyday. So I feel that a day will come when social media will be competing the search options. But his won’t be an overnight change; neither there are chances that it would happen in near future. It is just a thought that came to my mind.
But one thing that I am sure is Social Media has got many benefits which over grows the benefits given by search option. Let me share with you some of the benefits.
1) There is no manipulation in the results shown by social media, while for search results they can be manipulated.
2) Many a times the results displayed by the search engines are spam. We literally need to check each link to see whether the information is useful to us or not. So as compared to search results, the results shown by SM contains less spam.
3) Big Brands are also considering to as one of the strong means of marketing their product and services, the influence of social media is growing continuously.
4) Social media search is very much younger than the normal search, but the influence that it has built in this short span of time, may be one day it can become potential enough to surpass the normal search.
5) The only option for you to reach your target audience is either through organic search or PPC. But while opting for social media you have many options where you can reach and communicate with your target audience.
6) The major benefit that the Social Network carries is that you can communicate and get in touch with your target audience in real time. Days are gone when you publish a material and wait for days to see the response. Here using social media you can get your response immediately.
7) Another benefit that the social network carries is that you can get in touch with the human directly and start communication. While thinking of normal search you generally communicate through links which has a longer response time.
8) Also SM now a day are providing the searching facility right on their platform and they are also enabling to pull and show the normal search results using their social networking platform itself.
9) In terms of cost also social far less expensive than the normal search. Think of the cost that you need to pay to market your website using any PPC campaign. While for social network you just need to spend time online communicating with your group.
10) You can really build up a brand using SM. While communication with your audience show them that you just don’t carry with you a webpage with just content, but you also have strong personality and knowledge to impress anyone and build a trustable brand.
So here comes the million dollar question: will social media marketing move ahead in the race with search engine marketing? The pace with which social media marketing is growing it slowly has made its strong impact in the field of web marketing and many huge business brands are opting for social media marketing as a new mean of growing business and getting in direct touch with their audience.