Everybody uses social networking sites like Facebook to catch up with long lost friends, to share photos, or just keep in touch, but can social sites really boost your search engine optimisation efforts? The short answer is yes – read on for an overview of how different social media can be used to help promote your business online.
Social media platforms provide a fantastic, free and easy way to promote your business. Not only do they help increase your brand awareness and provide easily accessible information to your followers, but it is very likely that they also help boost your keyword rankings in search engines.
Search engines crawl Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest and gather information about how people interact with your brand and your content. This can help search engines to judge the quality of a content source and determine its credibility and page ranking. A high number of social shares throughout these platforms demonstrate to search engines that you content is compelling and trustworthy. Equally, a high amount of active followers engaging with your content indicates the author’s credibility. There is also evidence that an esteemed business or a follower with a large influence who shares your content, can help power your company’s search engine results. In other words the more buzz about your company in the social media the better your website’s visibility in search results.
Social media breakdown:
Facebook offers a popular and user-friendly service that is open to all – so get your business on there to raise brand awareness. The advantage of advertising on Facebook is that it uses the demographics and information about user interests to fine tune a target audience. To build up followers of your page you must be active and share relevant information, sometimes about other companies as well as your own to build up trust.
Tweets generate leads as they refer traffic to your website: Twitter helps you grab an audience’s attention as you transform your long articles into punchy 140-character tweets. Twitter also helps you understand what people are talking about so you can tailor your content to the latest twitter gossip.
As with other social networks there is much debate over whether engagement on your Google+ page has an impact on your keyword rankings. It is likely that Google is assessing the data from Google+ as a signal of authority for your content but we cannot be sure.
More tangible advantages to having a Google+ page are that you can verify your business addresses, so that your business can appear in Google’s local listings, this could also assist you with location specific keywords.
The Google+ circles feature helps you separate you friends, family, followers, business associates and more which means you can select what content your sending out to whom (no other social platform has this). Also, Google Hangout allows you to video call up to 10 others simultaneously.
LinkedIn is tailored for businesses and professionals. Great for B2B marketing, LinkedIn can be a great place to start discussions. Join relevant groups and provide your expertise to get noticed. You can create a company page to promote your business and ask your clients to promote your business using the ‘recommendation’ tools.
According to TNW our brain processes visuals faster and we are able to retain more information from them than any other media. Additionally, visual information is quicker to consume than written information. So visual content in social media allows your audience to engage with, respond and share your content quicker. Videos can put a face to your business and their viral nature means that your business can reach circles quickly and easily extend beyond them.
With over 70 million users, Pinterest is also a great way to stimulate the eyes into recognising your brands character and charm. You can choose what theme you put on to your boards making it easier for users to find what they are looking for. This social media forum helps you spread enticing images of your product or services, so take some snaps, upload and share and you should get some leads to your website.
There exists a great array of social media platforms, and by taking advantage of their unique features you can easily promote you business for free. By tailoring your content to particular audiences within social networking sites, you can optimise the amount of engagement that your posts receive. All the while, as you build up communities and increase follower engagement, Google recognises you as a reliable, credible source. In return for your efforts, you will see trust for your brand increase, referral traffic to your website rise and even improvement in your search engine rankings