Which is more important, your Ranking on Google or your Target Audience Following on Twitter?
Without question you want to be seen online and many companies spend a great deal of their marketing budgets exploring ways to increase the chances of potential customers visiting their website or other capture pages in order to sell their products and services. I thought it time to explore the question of “Which is more important, your Ranking on Google or your Target Audience Following on Twitter?“.
I believe that this comparison is won by Twitter because the value that a target audience that follows you on social media outweighs the key benefits and ROI from achieving a high ranking on Google. Reasons for this are:
- If you have an active target audience following you on a social media platform, in this case Twitter, then they are far more responsive than those going to Google doing a search for keywords. On Twitter your audience could be either searching for keywords or simply using the channel to socialise / network and on each occasion can come past a post from you that sells them your product / service.
- Twitter has it’s own search facility so just like Google, you will appear on a list of most relevant. You can appear as not only an account, but by Tweet, image, news and more… Correct keyword / hashtagging allows you to be seen just as keywords and phrases, titled images etc gives you presence on Google.
- You can promote your account and Tweets which is the same as sponsored placements for keywords on Google.
- If you grow a sizeable target audience on Twitter you could achieve more engagement with your Tweets over the amount of times your keyword / phrase is searched for on Google.
- Google is all about waiting for people to use their platform to search for keywords, you can not affect who will be using the search engine and when. On Twitter, with a target audience following, you can market to each individual person when you want to and on many occasions, with push notifications etc, your followers will be notified when they are mentioned. Clever and non-spam style marketing with this in mind, can deliver far better results over Google.
- If you have a large and active target audience on a social media platform, then you have a whole marketing channel in the palm of your hand that outweighs advertising in the local paper, industry magazines, Google ranking, leaflet dropping and more… Just imagine that the town you have your estate agency in has 25,000 residents and that those 25,000 followed you on Twitter – Each and every tweet you send has the chance to be seen by all of them at some point another over a period of say 2 weeks to 1 month and you can message them with your promotions, listings, news whenever you decide with whatever keyword and content you wish ~ surely that is an incredibly valuable tool to have?
I am not suggesting that we simply ignore Google or do not put into place actions that help with ranking us on their search engine, we’d be foolish to do that – But I do believe that to see a better ROI, especially during 2015 and the next few years until we are presented with another marketing style / trend, we should look to spend our marketing budgets / time more towards social media over than our placements on Google.
No doubt that the likes of house for sale or property auction are great search terms to be found with on Google, but the costs of these are growing and at present, the likes of your search term being presented to an interested party on their news feed is currently free, the mathematics tell me that so long as your target audience is growing, then the better ROI you’ll see from Twitter over Google.
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