Social Optimization: Your Content Or Yourself?

There is an interesting conversation going on at Cre8asite Forums about your clients participating in social networks and the importance of that.

The given is that social is growing in importance, as it related to search rankings either indirectly and in the future, directly.

The bigger question in the thread is, do you yourself need to be active in social or does your content need to be socially appealing? The easy answer is both.

But like EGOL said in the thread, not everyone who writes the outstanding content is able to participate within social networks. People are disinterested, too busy, confused or unable to be part of the social networks, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and others.

Does that leave them at a disadvantage or can the content make up for it.

EGOL wrote:

Although I don't embrace social with my time my website gets a lot of traffic from Facebook, Stumble, Pintrest and especially the TIL part of Reddit. My visitors take my content to social for me because they want to share it with others. It works nicely. Other people do the jobs that I don't want to do and I don't have to pay them. That's how things are supposed to work IMO. It is more genuine to let it happen that way rather than hiring a shill to do it for you.

Indeed but if there is a conversation going on at the social network and if you are not there, that can be an issue. Of course, also, building your own authority outside of your own web site, then as you share content, it just helps spread that content through the network - that also is natural.