One of the questions often discussed by marketing professionals is how to quantify social media. How do you justify your efforts? To find the answers, I asked 12 professionals from different areas of marketing to weigh in on the relationship between SEO, SM, and SEM. Here’s what they had to say.

While the industry continues to question if social media is a Google search ranking factor, it’s hard to argue there isn’t a relationship. For Bing it’s not a question of if, but rather a question of impact. Either way, companies earnestly active on social media tend to create more interactions and coverage, leading to earned off-site backlinks and citations which unquestionably impact SEO. Go ahead and count the citations, sometimes very authoritative as is the case with trusted domains like Facebook, on your social profiles as a bonus.

And while your social media profiles and posts may or may not directly cause improved ranking of your website or its content, their appearance in SERPs, including on social networks themselves, contributes to your overall online visibility and reputation management. That’s reason enough to make social and SEO part of your marketing mix.