Social media content marketing is an effective strategy to engage prospective customers, but it's only useful if consumers can find a brand's social profile.

Social media content marketing is an effective strategy to engage prospective customers, but it's only useful if consumers can find a brand's social profile. According to a new report from PageLever, search engines are crucial to driving traffic to these pages.

The report, which analyzed more than 1,000 Facebook pages, found that Google accounts for more than one-quarter (27.6 percent) of external referrer traffic to social profiles. Meanwhile, about 4 percent and 2 percent of referral traffic to social sites is driven by Yahoo and Bing, respectively. This is peculiar, especially given the relationship Bing has with Facebook – as Brafton has reported, Microsoft's search engine uses Facebook data to serve more personalized results.

YouTube is also an effective driver of traffic to Facebook pages. According to the data, it drives 3.1 percent of externally referred page views, which is more than Bing.

As PageLever notes, optimizing social media content for search engines can result in a big lift in views and exposure. This is especially the case given the standard deviation of the study, which showed that a significant portion of some pages' views are derived from search engines.

With comScore reporting more than 17 billion queries were fielded by portals during July alone, brands need to ensure their websites and social pages are optimized to maximize potential leads and conversions.