“Let’s start at the very beginning; a very good place to start.” As a child you would sing this at the top of your lungs along with Maria Von Trapp every time you watched The Sound of Music (for the millionth time I bet). But it is only in your adult years that you truly appreciate the basic truth concealed in this lyric. In order to truly understand certain concepts, they must be simplified. Instead of diving head first into content marketing vs. social media marketing vs. SEO, each concept should be fully understood in its own capacity.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy. The main focus is on creating and sharing informative and relevant quality content in order to attract a well-defined target audience. The trick is in staying consistent with the quality of your content in order to keep the audience who were attracted to your content in the first place. The goal of this strategy is to not only have an engaged readership, but ultimately drive them into becoming profitable customers. This is where great article writing and content writing come in.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing is another marketing strategy using social media platforms. The overall premise of social media is the creation and sharing of interesting and informative content in the form of posts. Social Media Marketing is merely using this premise and altering it slightly by creating brand/service/product awareness via the creation and sharing of interesting and informative posts involving your brand/service/product. The goal is to ultimately turn these reads and shares into website traffic, which then become leads.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically this is the technical process that affects your website’s visibility in a search engine’s results. In laymen’s terms: by using certain SEO tactics and strategies, you can have an impact on whether your website pops up on the first, second or even last page of search results when someone googles your brands, product or services. These SEO tactics are used during the delivery of most article writing service or content writing service.

By taking a quick look at the explanations defining each of these concepts, you can clearly see that while they are all entirely different entities, there is a lot of overlapping of these concepts that happen within the marketing industry while establishing and promoting a brand. For instance; you will have to use your content creation skills when writing posts for your social media marketing. The same goes for your SEO; without content you cannot incorporate your technical SEO tactics. But here are three very specific differences:

1.Location location location

While content marketing skills should be used in your social media marketing, along with your SEO strategies, all these concepts take place on very different places. Your content marketing is the main focus on your business/company website. Your social media marketing takes place on third party social media platforms, each with their own rules and regulations you should adhere to. SEO is no longer as simple as scattering a few keywords throughout your content. It has become so technical that a lot of businesses have their websites personally built by a web developer who incorporates certain SEO tactics throughout the development process in order to increase their website ranking on a search engine.

2. The limits

When writing content for your blog or website, you can ultimately control the length of your content. There is no set limit to which you must adhere to. In social media marketing as well as SEO (Google ads for example) your word count cannot exceed a certain limit. For example: you can only use 140 characters when posting via Twitter. These length limitations differ between every social media platform and various Google ads and banners.

3.The kind of content.

While shares are always welcomed, a blog post for instance, is written to inform and entertain and hopefully get the reader to read the next post, and leave a positive or interesting comment. Social media content is mainly there to attract readers, entice them to share the content as much as possible and also engage in the content (like, share, retweet etc…) SEO should not even be noticed within your content. It should be the silent search engine navigator to that elusive and popular page one ranking.

Picture by Brian