Once upon a time in search engine land, SEO rose to prominence. SEO was king. Those days are in the past and we can safely say that social media has completely taken over.

Merely blogging is also dead as the only blogging platforms that are relevant are the ones with social aspects. I’ll save that discussion for another post.

My business partner Dustin and I have been on a mission to spread the word about our latest start-up Smaller Than 500, Inc. After some failed PPC marketing attempts we thought “let’s write a blog and do some content marketing!” Sure, that’s great but if I’m only willing to wait years to build a following through SEO. You see, the problem is we know for a fact that there are already over 200 million blogs on the internet. What are the odds a brand-new blog can even stand out and make an impact?

One of the critical principles of SEO is simply building lots of content. When we consulted the President of SEO firm Titan SEO, Danny Sheppard, he told me that we should start with at least a few hundred pages of content. A few hundred pages of content? Who has the time for this? Even if we managed to pull this off, would the content even be valuable? At Smaller Than 500, we strongly believe that less is more.

We did some research on our competitors such as Monster, Career Builder, etc… Let’s take Monster as an example. Monster was founded in 1999 and has been publishing content ever since then. It has over 1.2 million pages indexed in Google. As optimistic as I am about the future success of our company, there is no feasible way we will get to 1.2 million pages indexed in Google shortly. It’s an exercise in futility for the near term.

What’s the solution? As Robert Scoble points out frequently, you must go to where people are. On August 6th, 2014 Scoble formally announced that he was leaving his hosted WordPress blog for social media. He now posts daily on Facebook as well as Google+ & Twitter. I admit it took a while for this concept to finally sink in. Yesterday it dawned on me that I must start publishing on platforms where I can get our voice out and be heard. I realized that we have awesome content but it’s ultimately silenced by being published on our desolate blog.

I dipped my toe in the waters of social media a bit more by publishing an exclusive post on LinkedIn yesterday about being On The Path To Mastery. After a single day we are now seeing much better results than any of the blog posts in which SEO was our primary strategy for building an audience. The most exciting part is the increased interaction we now have with folks. I can see that we are now on the path to building an audience.

Will social media content marketing be easier? No. But at least it’s plausible and that’s what counts. Building an audience with a content marketing strategy via SEO seems hardly plausible without becoming a full-time writer. We got in the business to help small business owners and career searchers connect, not to become full-time journalists. When we do write, we want it to count and add value to the conversation. As I stated earlier, less is more!

One final thought. I can hear all the SEO freaks already. “Social media is a walled garden!” That is true and that is why it’s common sense to plant seeds in more than one garden for your plants to grow. This is why your reading this post on Medium. It’s also why you’ll see original content from me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ & Tumblr. Our hosted blog will be an aggregate of all our social media posts. The beauty is that each platform has different types of audiences and that in turn equals a diverse network of people to interact with. With social media content marketing the best content wins, not the most content.