Does social media marketing pose a threat to search engines?

There has been some speculation among search engine optimization companies as to whether social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are a threat to search engines like Google. The thought is that, as more people use social media marketing to seek out sites, traditional search engines will cease to exist.

This has largely come about as a result of an article in the Guardian newspaper, which suggested that Facebook was a threat to Google owing to the large number of people now using it as their default homepage.

At first glance, the Guardian article looked worrying from Google's point-of-view, as it stated that Facebook was the fourth source of visits to social media and news sites after Google, MSN and Yahoo, and that the number of people following links from Facebook to social media sites had almost tripled in one year. However, this is rather misleading, as the article was comparing Facebook to Google News - which is not the representative face of Google. If you compare Google search with Facebook, Google is still responsible for 60% of all searches made.

Furthermore, if you looked more closely you realised the main worry was the effect of social media marketing on paid search spending. Paid searches are the method e-commerce sites use to place ads on search engine pages and internet sites. Payment is made each time an ad is clicked, and the website visited. Evidently, if this revenue was hit, it would be a cause for concern for the search engines involved.

In fact, search engine optimisation is still the most sure-fire way for website owners to increase traffic to their sites. Despite the growth in social media optimization, the global search market increased by almost 50% in 2009. A major cause of this is the growth in Smartphone technology. In Japan, more than 30% of all Google searches are conducted by mobile.

The more obvious threat to Google is YouTube, which is now the second largest search engine in the world - however, it is actually owned by Google! While sites depending on Google for traffic are unlikely to suffer erosion of their SEO rankings from social media marketing, there could be an impact on the revenue Google makes from paid searches.

Many companies recommend "pay per click" (PPC) advertising as a faster method of generating traffic than using search engine optimisation tools alone. However, several e-commerce sites, including at least one search engine optimisation company, have axed PPC marketing, preferring instead to use conventional SEO techniques in combination with social media marketing on sites like Twitter. They realised that, with social media being integrated into search results, SMO was actually more dependable, and getting better results, than PPC marketing.

Social media optimization and SEO complement each other perfectly. Social media tools can be used by e-commerce sites to gain rankings in the search engines via the "social" route, while giving their sites brand exposure that pay-per-click advertising never will. The return on investment for both SEO and SMM is far higher than that for PPC.