By Dave Lloyd on March 4, 2014, Contributor for Adobe

I know what you’re prob­a­bly think­ing: why do I want to read a post about social media mar­ket­ing writ­ten by a search mar­ket­ing guy? Well, before you bounce, let me con­nect the two mar­ket­ing dis­ci­plines in my own way.

For a cou­ple years, search mar­ket­ing inte­gra­tion has increased with other dis­ci­plines (social, geo, and tech­ni­cal espe­cially) in response to changes to search algo­rithms. Social activ­ity is now con­sid­ered an exten­sion of search mar­ket­ing. While social engage­ment may be depen­dent on WHO is “talk­ing,” social sig­nals have been pro­gres­sively used within a search enable­ment practice—more specif­i­cally focused on WHAT is being “said.” Social users are search­ing for spe­cific top­ics, prod­ucts, and other cri­te­ria to find out what oth­ers are say­ing, which is why social and search mar­ket­ing prac­tices must be blended to max­i­mize dis­cov­ery. While social engage­ment is used to dis­cover sales oppor­tu­ni­ties and engage mar­ket seg­ments for prod­uct devel­op­ment, there is also sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­nity to dis­cover search phrase relevancy.

Now, how does a social strat­egy relate to search cam­paigns? There are three pri­mary search mar­ket­ing ele­ments that ben­e­fit from a strong social strategy:

• SERP (search engine results page) rank­ings – Social sig­nals, in the forms of retweets, likes, +1s, and shares have become increas­ingly impor­tant to page rank. Algo­rithms are con­tin­u­ously updated to reflect social pres­ence and influ­ence as a key indi­ca­tor of relevance.
• Local­iza­tion – Aocial activ­ity reveals the ter­mi­nol­ogy local users are search­ing, which pro­vides rel­e­vant key terms that should be used for site opti­miza­tion and mar­ket­ing asset deploy­ment. Local teams engaged socially become stronger on the search side.
• Key­word strat­egy – As indi­cated by what we call the “vir­tu­ous cycle between search and social,” there is a con­stant and dynamic rela­tion­ship between the two dis­ci­plines.  Analy­sis of social con­ver­sa­tions gives search mar­keters details on trend­ing or impor­tant key­words that can be included in con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts.

So both social pres­ence and social response are crit­i­cal to devel­op­ing suc­cess­ful opti­miza­tion and global search mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. Social mar­keters must respond effec­tively and con­sis­tently to drive search excel­lence. They must gen­er­ate traf­fic as an influ­encer, which will in turn gen­er­ate key…

READ MORE:  http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/key-social-media-marketing-success-respond/