Content marketing is indeed on the rise, as Google Trends shows. As searches for “content marketing” are increasing, searches for its cousin term “social marketing” are decreasing. (View live Google Trends chart or archived version).
Does this mean social marketing is going out of style? By no means!
Be very careful when using Google Trends. This service from Google shows how many people are searching for a particular term. Social marketing has been around for quite some time, therefore, many people aren’t googling “social marketing” anymore. Instead, they have moved onto more advanced branches of social marketing.
Take a look at a Google Trends chart comparing “social marketing strategy” versus “content marketing strategy” (live or archived version)
Simply by adding “strategy” to the search term, we see that more and more people are interested in the strategy behind BOTH social marketing and content marketing.
Both are important strategies to your content marketing–especially when coupled by a hub-and-spoke model of having everything in your social campaigns point back to your master website. Mary Gaulke of PNConnect outlines the explosion of content marketing and the importance of this type of content-focused strategy. Give that article a read, I have been a proponent of the hub-and-spoke strategy for as long as websites have been around. All content needs a good permanent home.
Neat article Matt! For me, combining both is far way better than choosing just one between the two. Create a valuable and relevant content (content marketing) and then have that published to social media websites (social marketing).