SOCIAL MEDIA KILLED SEO. Wait. What?
Intro
More and more successful businesses are built around social media personalities. SEO stays relevant but is trailing. That seems to be especially true for new businesses entering the stage.
If you want to make it big and break the SEO barrier then you need to build a social media brand and strategy.
Examples
(also from the German market):
Prof. Dr. Christoph Juhn created a massive following for his German niche tax consultancy. This success is driven by his educational YT videos (YT 130k alone). Christoph is an exceptional example of how to establish your business in a crowded market. SEO alone would never have worked (imho). Well done!
Gergely Orosz established himself as an engineering personality “The Pragmatic Engineer”. He now successfully runs his own paid substack + book + many more ventures. Really cool.
Philipp Westermeyer runs one of THE most successful German podcasts “OMR podcast”. It directly pushes his OMR brand and all offerings of OMR. Amazing success story.
Finanzfluss is another German financial education website. The success is also mostly driven by their exceptional social game. Great content on Youtube, discord and many more. They are selling a course on financial education, a book and make money by affiliate links.
David Heinemeier Hansson - Founder of Rails and 37Signals. Became well known for Rails. He’s also vocal on a range of political topics (critical of DEI topics in general). He builds his personal brand, but pushes his ventures at the same time (hey.com as an example).
Doppelgänger - A podcast tech talk with investment topics created by Philipp Glöckler and Philipp Klöckner. They do interesting stuff and also build their personal brands around it. They recently started a newsletter. I think especially Philipp Klöckner uses Doppelgänger to expand his personal brand, get more known and get more investment opportunities. Great approach.
Immocation - Two friends interested in making money with properties. Started with Youtube and built a huge following. Expanded into offering a “Masterclass” with experts that teach you how to invest right. Massive success story.
I could go on and on and on. If you start something without proper social media strategy you are going to fail..
Two things are important to decide:
- Personal brand or company brand. Juhn for instance clearly pushes his very well defined company and does not do anything else. David created a very flexible personal brand that talks about much more (engineering topics, leadership, brand building). That way David can push technological topics, but also business ventures.
- What level of political involvement you have - and how opinionated you are. Someone like Peter Thiel or David is very politically vocal (which makes some people angry). Others are very neutral and simply don’t comment any hot topics. Up to you. But beware of the fact that people will start to hate you online one way or the other.
… or will AI kill SEO?
That’s something Stephan commented on Linkedin.
My take: I think that makes my point even stronger. Startups and businesses have to focus even more on a good “social media game”. That way they’ll be found. And if they are found that way SEO / or any kind of AI “recommending things” will also work.
Conclusion
Is SEO really dead? NO! It will help you and can support your business massively. But it is bad as a launch strategy and won’t be enough for most businesses. Helping people, building a personal brand and then pushing your own business ventures is something everyone should consider.
