Need to build your business online? Social media can play a key role. Social media platforms are now no longer just messaging and acquisition channels. Social media marketing services are a key part of a business’s larger marketing efforts. Combining SEO and social media will provide even more benefits.
Businesses are now gradually recognizing the importance of being active on different social media platforms to better engage their target audience. A 2021 Hootsuite report noted that there are more than 4.2 billion active social media users across the globe. Social media marketing offers businesses the opportunity to reach out to this audience. For instance, top platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest Live offer different eCommerce tools to display their Pages and sell their products. Likewise, all business sectors can use social media to attract their target audience via interactive posts or images with links to their website and take a specific action.
How Social Media Supports SEO
While social media can’t directly influence SEO rankings, it can impact factors that affect your rankings such as likes, shares, posts, engagement, etc. Social SEO is using social media to enhance your search engine performance. Social SEO strategies can improve your search engine discoverability, build brand awareness, expand your outreach, provide more opportunities to connect with more potential buyers and increase your conversion rate.
Things have changed a lot over the years. Social networks have transformed marketing and their popularity is expected to grow.
Take a look at these statistics –
- 8% of global internet users use social media to search for brand-related information (Hootsuite)
- More than half of global internet users (55.9% female users and 51% male users) between the ages of 16 and 24 use social media to research brands
- The average daily time spent using social media is 2h 27m (Smart Insights)
Having a social media profile for your business isn’t just enough. Combined together, SEO strategies and social media campaigns can do wonders in improving your online presence and thus better rankings.
Top Social Media Platforms For SEO
Smart Insights reports that 4.62 billion people around the world now use social media.
The types of social media content marketers find most valuable in driving social shares are –
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Images
- Stories
- Live videos
What are social signals? Are they important?
Social signals refer to the user’s action on social networks, such as shares, comments, views, likes, reposts, and more, with links leading to your site. Some other relevant social signals include a number of tweets and retweets, Facebook shares, as well as mentions on community sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Tumblr.
Social signals in tandem with SEO can impact your search engine result ranking (SERP). Let’s see how
In January 2014, Matt Cutts said that Google does not use signals from social media as a direct ranking factor for search. Matt confirmed that Google was blocked from crawling social pages. Google does not crawl these pages as they contain mostly personal and time sensitive content.
Then, why should businesses optimize their social profiles?
SEO experts still consider inbound links from social media as playing a key role in influencing SEO rankings. The best way to utilize social channels in your digital marketing strategy is by creating relevant content.
As I said earlier, social media can impact key factors such as social signals that can affect your rankings. You cannot ignore those millions and billions of active users on diverse social platforms. Neither can you completely ignore the chances that your content on social pages will be indexed?
Consider what Cutts said, “Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results”.
However, it stops there. Cutts said that to the best of his knowledge, Google currently doesn’t have any signals like that in its web search ranking algorithms that special specific work that says “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”.
So can businesses social media to improve their online presence? By using organic SEO services to align the goals of SEO and social media.
Building Social Signals
Social signals can indicate a solid reputation and it helps to determine exactly how many people like and share your content and what is best for the user.
We’ve tried these strategies to help businesses turn up the volume on social signals.
- Post daily. Don’t just post anything. Make sure to shape your content to meet the needs of your consumers.
- When to post also matters. Almost all brands will be sharing some sort of post every day. To increase the chances of your
content being seen, consider identifying the best times to post. - Listen to what people are discussing about your brand and respond to their reviews in a constructive and positive way.
- Track all the social signals such as – shares, re-tweets, likes and keywords associated with your brand.
- Digital marketers can consider spending on social ads to successfully achieve any kind of reach. Know where your audiences are
and invest accordingly. Begin with small budget ads and compare the results to choose the right one. - Make it easy for readers to share your content. Embedding social sharing buttons within the email is an ideal option to engage
readers and subscribers can share the content swiftly. Make use of the ‘forward to friend’ option too to increase the
likelihood of your content being seen. - A powerful influencer sharing your content on social platforms can add credibility to your brand. Make sure to choose
influencers who have built up a powerful network and have a significant social media following. Tools like BuzzSumo help
identify top influencers in your industry.
Social media platforms can be effectively used to build your brand and grow your business.
Ask us how. Call us at (800) 941-5527!
It is important for businesses to be up to date with current social trends and implement effective social media marketing strategies. Being an experienced social media digital marketing company, MedResponsive can handle all aspects of developing your brand’s social presence, let that be review generation or paid advertising,
Get to know the 2022 social media trends and some effective social media marketing strategies in our next blog.
