All too often businesses do not fully understand and exploit – Social Media – to expand. Having said that as of today there are very few businesses that deny the social media marketing is important for their growth. Whether a business has the ability to understand and exploit – Social Media – for business expansion social media marketing is here to stay.
It’s really up to each business to make sure that it uses social media to its best advantage. There are a ton of advantages to using Social Media Marketing (SMM) for growing business:
- Enhanced customer service
- Brand recognition
- Lasting customer relationships
- Multiple fans and followers that can be converted to paying customers
- Multiple – Likes – that will help push the business deeper among customers
Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) is yet another technique used by business for marketing themselves online. Millions of customers use search engines like Google, Bing, ( among others ) to locate what they are searching for on the Internet.
Any business that cannot be found in a search engine is invisible to millions of potential customers. Such invisibility is detrimental to any business. SEO and SMM do not exist in complete isolation of each other. There must be a strong blend of SEO techniques applied to all SMM material created and deployed. The SEO techniques blended in help the SMM material to get found by potential customers. This does translate into money in a bank account at the end of the day.
Here are a few useful tips that you can apply to your SMM activities which aids SEO.
Create Multiple Social Networking Profiles
Everyone seems to believe that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the total scope of social media today. They are very far from the truth here. There are literally a multitude of smaller social networking sites who attract and hold specific types of site visitors.
Each such business profile created, has the potential to rank well in search engines. This helps bring the business to the notice of seekers of the products or services of the business.
Do remember that one needs to create business profiles on such niche social media sites only if one is serious about being involved with the site. An active social media profile is huge advantage to a business than one that has been created only for its – Back link.
Social media sites are really great places to build lasting relationships with customers and a strong supportive community around the business.
Keywords Are Vital In Tweets And Posts
Okay, Twitter offers only 140 characters which limits content, but it’s a great way to share a link back to your Blog which can carry a ton of useful information for your customers. Do incorporate – Keywords – in your tweet, this helps that tweet to get included in search engine result pages.
This is great for information seekers who can be converted to loyal customers. Do your best to incorporate – Keywords – in the title of your tweet. Write a short description about the content of a Post, this is a great place to target – Keywords.
Drive Traffic To Your Money Site
When posting to Facebook or LinkedIn, do not include the whole post, include an intriguing snippet of content and a – Call To Action – to click the link included to your money site. This drives people from your social media profile to your money site. Site visitors flooding into your money site makes this site very interesting to search engines. If people read all the material on your social media site this prevents them from ever coming across to your money site.
On your website do include links to your social medial profiles. These links should not be prominent on your website pages ( you do not want to drive visitors away from your money site, do you? ). There is little to be gained by someone – Liking – your content on Facebook when you want them to by purchasing your products or services. Social media profiles should serve as gateways to your money site not the other way around.
Then why have links on your website at all? Well recommendations on your social media profiles from people seem to carry a great deal of more weight to readers than recommendations visible on your website.
Connect With Influential Personalities In Social Media
Every industry has a leader that your website’s target audience would turn to for advice. These persons can definitely help position a brand / business in front of the target audience. Do connect with such influential personalities on social networking sites. This is the very first step in building a relationship with them. Social media marketing is really a give and take situation. One cannot expect others to share your content if you do not share theirs.
Google has indicated that its takes – Author authority – into account when looking at social media to influence their search engine result pages. Hence, a link shared by an active user has more value to Google and other search engines, that the same link shared by a – Spam account. Quantity is good, but quality wins over quantity any day.
Ensure A Reasonable Time Frame When Publishing Content
Content posted on any social networking site has a shelf life. Facebook posts would get 50% of their – Likes – within the first hour of being posted. Then it takes approximately 22 hours to get 95% of its likes.
Hence, publishing needs to be carefully timed. Publishing too early means the content is being pushed out, publishing after prolonged intervals means one fails to engage the community. Content marketing is vital for any SEO strategy, but there is a fine line between too much and too little content.
Many social media sites permit – Social Media Sign-ins. This means that you can leave your comments using your Facebook or LinkedIn Login. All activity on such a site is then automatically linked to ones Facebook or LinkedIn account and gets published there. Depending how much Blog commenting you are doing, its possible that some people in your social media network may feel that you are spamming them and leave.
Surprisingly, the time when content is posted seems to be important as well. It was noticed that when content was posted to Facebook or LinkedIn pages outside normal working hours the audience engagements rates were considerably higher.
