A complement in economics is considered something that adds value to another good.  For example, for those that like peanut butter sandwiches, jelly may be considered a complement as it may add more utility or happiness to the consumer.  This definition of a complement is oversimplified, but can apply to social media and search engine optimization.  Social media has become more effective than ever before for raising brand awareness and communicating with customers.  Twitter and Facebook have become two of the most popular social media websites but brand managers often speculate on how effective these mediums are at keeping customers informed.  Firms and marketers also look for ROI performance metrics and whether search engine marketing is synergistic with social media.  There are several reasons why SEO is a complement to social media.  Here are some examples:

• Feeds/Power Users - Internet power users use feeds or Firefox addons etcetera that allow users to be logged in and just see brief feed news or status updates like Outlook emails, if a feed crosses about a website or topic and someone briefly glances at it but cannot see the whole listing: it helps that major keywords that may have been seen can be found quickly in search results for more information.
• Comments - As Facebook becomes a greater source of news, many individuals’ updates and wall posts have keywords associated with them that other users may search for to add information or insights to content from friends and colleagues.  Check Facebook Lexicon for keyword phrase trends and make sure relevant websites can be found for similar terms in search engines. 
• Blogs - Many internet users repost an appropriate link based on keywords from related blogs to follow up with a friend, prove a point or win a gentleman’s wager.  It helps to be found quickly in SERPs when a blog post, video, comment or link that is related to a client’s brand, product or service is posted on a social media site.  
• Social Media Link Referrals - Web users often look at link referrals from friends from social media and try to find competitive prices or substitute items in search engines.  Good metadata and tagged pictures can help brands represent to potential a customer the look and feel of the website and the product or service being offered.  A customer should be able to see an updated preview of deep pages in the site when it is shared – not just the home page.  Make sure the preview image to a shared video or link has relevant, enticing, descriptive info.  Avoid extremely long URLs if possible as well…

Optimized website pages are necessary to receive the full benefits of emerging technologies and are a long term strategy for obtaining traffic.  To help with SEO efforts, social media assets should also have common themes, tags, nomenclature, keyword phrases and relevant descriptions associated with them.   This helps link building and helps create a complete, synergistic, social media profile that can increase “brand web credibility”.  Social media and SEO are for the most part economic complements and it is useful to implement both as part of a comprehensive campaign with an integrated approach.  It is not uncommon for a good social media program to provide upwards of 20% or more targeted traffic with higher conversion probabilities than other methods for obtaining internet visitors such as pay per click or media buying.

Celestine O. Chukumba Ph.D.

http://www.InterSearchMedia.com

http://www.Twitter.com/Intersrchmedia