Link Building Through Social Media Is Not Like Traditional Link Building

[Juan]

There’s a great article over at The Link Spiel on link building. Debra Mastaler has some great thing to say in this article. Here’s a gem that I found quite intriguing:

Generating links through the social networks can be a crapshoot, you get what you get. Unlike traditional linking, you can’t pinpoint where those links will come from or control which sites to target.

So the question is, are the links generated through social media campaigns any less efficient?

That’s a great question. Debra goes on to provide some useful insight into the question, but I do have some thoughts.

First, link building is not as difficult as some people will have you believe. The hard part is knowing what kind of links have the best value. Not all links are created equal. Because of that, social media links and links garnered from social media marketing can be difficult to measure. Every site has its own challenges to overcome, but there are benefits as well. A few social sites offer their own link juice:

Digg
Propeller
Furl
Techorati
To name a few. Others, however, don’t:

del.icio.us
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Almost all of the rest
Like article marketing, though, you shouldn’t be using social media to gain links from the social media sites. Social media is not an end unto itself. It is the means to an end. You therefore have to see through the media to the other side and view your link building in terms of who you can reach through the social media sites that you are targeting.

Some industries, for instance, have niche social media sites that you can target. Your target market likely hangs out there. Using those sites will likely be more profitable for you than a general site like Digg or StumbleUpon. While you can potentially get a lot of traffic from the big social media sites, much of that traffic will likely be untargeted and unqualified. And, yes, you may get some links from those sites, but will those links help you in the long run?

Link building through social media marketing, as Debra Mastaler points out, is not like traditional link building. You can’t see it that way. It is important to count the costs of your time and investment before you go leaping and bounding into the never, never land of social media. There are benefits, to be sure, but those benefits, like everything else, should be carefully measured.

Read more here

Nick Stamoulis