It is pretty close to fact in this day and age that if you are using the internet, you have some sort of social media account. Over the past decade social media networks have continued to rise in popularity. What started as a pastime of college students is now a multi-billion dollar industry. If you are trying to build your company’s presence on the web, you are going to need to play ball in the social media game, too.
Social media is no longer something college coeds take up between classes. Moms, Dads, Sons, Daughters, Grandmas and Grandpas are online every day. The popular microblogging website Twitter has over 500 million users every month. Facebook, easily the most popular of all social networks, has about twice the populace of Twitter with more than one billion monthly users. Every media outlet in the country is using these platforms to spread their content. At the end of the day, if you aren’t using social media to your advantage, it might prove difficult to build an audience for your website.
SEO you can “Like”
Social media accounts are not one of the fundamental facets of good SEO practice, but that doesn’t mean they are something that can be ignored. Backlinking to your website and having quality, keyword-driven content are what will build your placement in the search results, but so will site popularity—and that is where social media accounts come into play.
Here are a few ways that you can use social media accounts to your advantage:
- Be present: Create company accounts on all of the leading social media platforms and post your company’s URL to your profile. This can direct social media users to your actual webpage.
- Be relevant: Social media networks are great tools to reach new people, but they are not perfect for constant advertising. Share relevant information that people want to read and try engaging with potential customers instead of advertising at them.
- Use quality content: To share content you need content, and for content to be worth sharing it needs to be worth reading—so stick with quality content.
- Add social media buttons to your website: By certain estimates about half of the US population has a Facebook account, even though not all are using them regularly. Add social media buttons to your website so that users can easily follow you there. This will create an instant relationship and give you a chance to repeatedly introduce your content into their newsfeed.
The way that social media can help your website’s SEO is simple: social media builds traffic. Social media networks thrive off of the concept of sharing. One person finds something interesting and tweets, posts or pins it for all of their friends, their friends’ friends and the friends of their friends’ friends to see. Before you know it that one link has reached anywhere between 10 and 100 people who would not have seen it otherwise. Now imagine that his link was to your website, and those friends and friends of friends are potential clients. This is where increased exposure and website traffic translates to good business practice.
What is more, search engines like Google and Bing admit to looking at shares, +1s and retweets when placing search results—especially in their news feeds. Creating a social media account is easy, but using it effectively for your website’s SEO isn’t quite as simple. The goal of your social media account should be to engage with other users. If you are engaging, they’ll come back for more.
