When people talk about “social media” marketing, what do they really mean? What is a “social strategy”? How do you get started? How do you measure success? These are some of the the daily discussions we see that usually revolve around how marketers can get more “fans” or make marketing more “viral”. But these questions are questions about distribution, which is an advertising-centric way to think about it.

In advertising, distribution drives content. On the other hand, in social media marketing, content drives distribution – that is, you have to have something important or interesting to “say” in order for someone to be interested enough to engage and pass it along. It is the content strategy that delivers distribution opportunities, audience cultivation and, ultimately, how a social media campaign may play out.

So how do you develop content that provides distribution? Here are four ways to break down social media marketing into specific content and distribution tactics.

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The search engines’ proprietary systems crawl billions of web pages to determines which pages will rank for each keyword within the top 10 organic search listings. These listings are the results on the search page that are not advertisements and to which approximately 40% to 60% of the clicks from the search results go.

With Americans conducting more than 12.6 Billion searches in October according to Comscore, search engines are on track to give away almost 100 Billion clicks for free per year. As you would expect, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become the must-do activity for online marketing success as businesses compete to get as many free clicks as possible from Google and other search engines.

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