Linkedin is a secret weapon that many people underutilize. :)

We use linkedin heavily for inbound marketing. It is working very well for us. www.stanfordwhoswho.com.

Always love reading more data. One of the reasons why LinkedIn has such a low score is that people are naturally uncomfortable with networking. LinkedIn represents the closest thing to networking of all the social media tools. As an inbound marketing agency, we are careful to match the networks used with the demographic of the user. Using all networks for everything is not necessarily the best strategy, as many organizations have limited budgets. I would love to see some trending informataion here. To Greg's point, social media another promotion channel for great content, but also a listening station. The more you listen, the more you know your prospects and are able to create the buyer profiles you need to target them.

Hey Kevin, I look at SEO and Social Media as being complementary initiatives that work hand in hand. And I think they belong together in an integrated strategy centered on marketing your content.

SEO has on-page and off-page initiatives. The off-page, attracting quality incoming links is said to be most important and can account for 75% of your total SEO efforts to attract traffic via search. What better way to attract traffic than to have relevant content you share via your social media engagement/content distribution channels? The more you build your SEO initiatives via optimizing content pages, blog articles, v-blogs, YouTube videos, slideshare content, etc., and share via and on social media sites the greater your opportunity to have people find you, like what you do, RT and spread your links to others and create backlinks to your content on their sites, blog articles and so on.

SEO authority builds through gaining more and more links, which again, comes back to the keywords, content, reach and influence garnered through social media marketing.

So, I don't think you approach it and say, "I'm just going to do SEO, or I'm only going to concentrate on leveraging social media." It's a 1+1=3 game.

Thanks,
Greg

Hey Greg, I agree with you that content creation/marketing is the holy grail of inbound marketing. My assumption is that content from Inbound Marketing topic seems to be concerned with the avenues of distribution: SEO and social media. As an Inbound Marketer, what are your thoughts on the differences between SEO and social media?

Thanks for your insight on LinkedIn- I hadn't thought to frame the individual user as the content source.

I couldn't agree with your more about the sociology of social media.

Hi Kevin, Interesting data but I wonder if we can draw very accurate conclusions, as you suggest from it. I think if we look at the larger universe of data and behavior all these are intertwined or connected in how we use the interactive web these days. Inbound marketers' strategy for lead generation certainly looks at the exponential effects they get from blogs, SEO, social media and so on. Social media, in my view has been wrongly seen as a "lead generation tool." I see it as a channel through which an inbound marketer establishes a connection and relationship with an interested audience and through which they may earn the opportunity to point them to valuable and relevant *content*. The holy grail of lead generation is content marketing - not social media.

LinkedIn, which we may (unfairly?) lump into the social media camp has its place too, and what I tend to see there are in-depth discussions through Groups and business-to-business connections being made and deepened. I don't believe we can draw conclusions about LI not being relevant with less than 1% of mentions in the titles Pinyadda is currently indexing. And again, I think LI has its place in content marketing - the content is you and the quality of your thoughts, ideas, questions and answers.

I'm glad to have this discussion about social media and lead generation for inbound marketing. A big issue I see is when "marketers" try and use social media as a direct response vehicle. Are we not sick and tired of the auto DM's we get on Twitter after we follow someone who immediately, without any idea of our needs and interests pitches us on a whiz-bang offer? That to me is the proverbial, outbound marketing, spray and pray that has zero place in the social media engagement I'm interested in.

To sum this up, I recently saw a quote from a presentation slide that said, referring to social media, something like, "It's not about technology it's about sociology." How true.