When it comes to ease of reading, there’s an unstated but very real conflict between SEO copywriting and social media writing. SEO copywriting’s main focus is, unsurprisingly, search engine optimization. While reader enjoyment and retention are nice goals to have, an SEO’d copy’s primary reader, at least in the Old School days, is the Search Engine bot. Googlebot reads text differently. (Judging from ranking reports from the latest update, its reading skills have recently improved with the use of LSI technology.) Consequently, the structure and presentation of various elements of the article/blog entry need to appeal to search engine bots and oftentimes, the user’s reading experience sometimes suffers.
Social media writing, on the other hand, focuses on the user experience. Digg and Mixx are filled with social media-centric articles. They all share the same characteristic–fun topics, easy to scan, highly segmented, etc. The traffic from these articles don’t come primarily from search engines but from users passing on the link to their circles of influence. Using Digg and Twitter, a user can explode the views of one social media piece if it is viral enough. With that said, writing elements of a social media piece often run counter to old school SEO canon of keyword/subkeyword driven text.
The challenge for SEO copywriters is to bridge the two often conflicting requirements of social media and SEO content. The answer here lies at the core–content value. Work from that common feature and you’d be surprised how you can address the needs of both SEO and Social media. Viral content that appeases the great SE Spider gods–that is your goal!
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