Social media marketing will probably never be able to compete with SEO for the really big searches, but it is definitely becoming a very important way to get traffic, and for the website owner who isn't a search optimization expert, social media marketing can be one of the best ways to reach your customers or readers. 

For example, it is incredibly hard to compete for almost any popular search these days, as every profitable niche for Google Adsense, Clickbank, Amazon, and company products has been examined, and taken over by professionals in the SEO business. 

You can either try to compete for a more specific search, or a search with lower competition, (which will probably also be less profitable), but unless you're talking low numbers, and many different pages, you will probably have to spend every day building back links to your site or page in order to compete, and you may ultimately be wasting your time. 

Social Media Marketing

I've had a lot of success with social media marketing on sites like Twitter, and I find that I can drive more traffic in the same amount of time by building my Twitter following than by building back links to my site. 

In six months of hard work finding followers on Twiends, I've built up a following of over 15,000 Twitter followers on one account, and more on a couple of others. 

What this means is that if I tweet all day, (I schedule tweets on Twaitter), I can get over 200 unique views to my website, and triple that in actual hits, which is a third of the traffic I would get if I was first on the first page of a Google search for my main keyword. 

Affordable social media marketing gets thousands of searches a month, but I can get that amount of traffic on almost anything I want, by making simple sales pages for a product, and setting up scheduled tweets for them at all times of the day on my different accounts, and increasing the followers every day. 

Then I get a new product, something completely different, and put that on as well, and sell different things to the same list of social connections as though they were an email list. 

This is the benefit of social media marketing versus SEO, when you have a social list, they are one step away from being your email subscribers, and you can promote almost anything you want to them. 

The main difference with social media marketing? It has nothing to do with keywords, so you just have to understand the basic demographic of your followers, and pick the products or services that you think they would buy. 

In social media marketing, you want to choose the products that sell the best, and would have the most competition on Google. So you see, if you're not an SEO expert, you have more chance of making sales on Twitter, and to some degree Facebook and You Tube, and that's why I think if there was a battle between social media marketing versus SEO, the average person should back social media marketing.