Updates from the field: How Facebook and Twitter interact with SEO

Social media marketing and SEO often seem like separate disciplines, but coordinating them is actually a big part of running successful web marketing campaigns. Yet as different as LinkedIn is from Google+, so too are the relationships among marketing channels. Recently, Facebook and Twitter made significant updates that alter how they interact with search engines, offering new possibilities for online brands.

Twitter: Brought to you by Google

Twitter held an Analyst Day event and announced new efforts to improve SEO visibility for certain types of social content. Specifically, Twitter is working hard to make sure that hashtags – or at least frequently used hashtags – are being crawled and indexed so Google queries bring up relevant Tweets.

What’s the marketing takeaway? Twitter wants hashtags to be transparent and useful, even if it means ceding some control over its content. Brands should be using them, both for social listening and to connect with online users to increase the visibility of online content. They also should take this as evidence of the fact that web users jump around from network to network and even temporarily leave Twitter in favor of Google to find additional Twitter content.

Here’s some background on Twitter’s relationship with Google and how Tweets are crawled.

 Facebook wants in on local search

While Twitter and Google establish a closer relationship, Facebook is doing the complete opposite and trying to take another bite out of the search engine’s market. The network recently unveiled a new dedicated Places search function, encouraging users to make it their first stop when looking for restaurants, shops, contractors and attractions.

It’s not yet clear how many people are going to use this function, but if brands don’t yet have a Facebook page, they certainly should now. Unlike Google search, which can turn up both the company’s information and any reviews posted online, Facebook search results are much more manageable because they generally turn up only a company’s unique profile.

Ultimately, brands that want to reach a wide web audience should be looking at Twitter and it’s open, crawlable content as a marketing solution. Conversely, Facebook is offering a great resource for local brands that operate physical storefronts – or that at least want to be identified with local areas. Businesses ought to carefully consider what goals they want to reach when they make tough decisions about which social media marketing channels to devote more resources to.

Alex Butzbach is a Marketing Writer at Brafton. He studied Communications at Boston College, and after a brief stint teaching English in Japan, he entered the world of content marketing. When he isn't writing and researching, he can be found on a bike somewhere in Metro Boston.