Is SMM (social media marketing) better than SEO?

[Param]

Hi all

I am new here but I have some experience of both SEO and SMM as a team leader. I have noticed that for short term visitors/leads oriented projects SMM seems to be better strategy than SEO. What’s your take on it.

[edited by: engine at 3:25 pm (utc) on April 15, 2009]
[edit reason] See TOS [/edit]

[Noton]

Currently yes SMM can bring in traffic quicker then SEO, but saying one is better then the other is not easy.

SEO has proven to be a long term performing investment, but SMM has brought some benefits its still too early to know how crowded and how the SMM systems will develop.

Think of SMM as the early days of SEO when things where easier just update the META info, and while the returns were good the same practices in SEO done today would not result in any benefits.

SMM, SEO, and SEM/PPC are all important and all bring in traffic and value, doing just 1 will bring results, but doing all 3 will bring the best results and that's why they are all important.

[Param]

"Think of SMM as the early days of SEO when things where easier just update the META info, and while the returns were good the same practices in SEO done today would not result in any benefits."

I disagree a little here as when we talk about SEO we are talking about optimizing for the machine (read search engine spiders) but when we are talking about SMM we are talking about human to human interaction. So while SEO practices which were good then may not be good enough anymore because search engine algorithms just got more evolved, good SMM practices are likely to remain good for long.

Here is an example - Casabalnca movie attracted visitors when it was released and it continues to attract visitors now and will continue doing so in future. It happened because the content was good and it added value to the viewers. Both good content and value addition apart from subtle promotion are the characteristics of good SMM. Believe me I am doing SMM at <snip> for last 2 years and good SMM promotional strategy has always borne good results for me.

[edited by: engine at 11:56 am (utc) on July 10, 2009]
[edit reason] See WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

[Noton]

I agree with you in that there is more human aspect to SMM but in the end SMM still using a system to get at those users, if the systems change the way they handle content, users and communities it can change things.

Also everything can be duplicated, just like in the SEO world in the beginning, I change my META then the guy below me copies mine and improve and gets above me and so on.

In the SMM world there are already duplicate communities stealing traffic/users off each other, often times videos are posted by multiple users, each adding his links/user profile and building his traffic.