It’s no secret, all your endeavours online can help or hinder how people find your business. So, how does social media help people searching for you on search engines like Google or Bing?
Combat Competitors & Negative Content
If you’re trying to beat out poor reviews, negative comments on websites like reddit or just take up more real estate in search engine result pages from your competitors, then social media can help. Adopting social platforms like Twitter, Instagram or Google+ can all help add weight to your managed profiles in search results over conversations you can’t manage. The trick here is to keep these profiles moving. Stagnant profiles, verified or otherwise, will lose ranking over time, so keep publishing (either through carefully crafted content specifically for that platform, or through syndication from another platform), and engage users in conversations where possible. Not only will you be better able to manage these conversations (and build positive brand sentiment) but these profiles will also adopt higher rankings than others, all pushing the nay-sayers and competition lower down the results pages.
Building Out Your Footprint
You don’t have to be everywhere to be seen. However, it does help to be seen in the right places. It helps when you know who you need to be seen by, who wants to see you, and where they already hang out. You wouldn’t expect to bump into a surfing enthusiast at the supermarket over the beach. Knowing your ideal customer helps to narrow down the who but how do you find out the where, and why does it matter? Wasting energy on developing content for the wrong platform isn’t just a waste of your time. It means the wrong people are going to see your messages. A professional can help you find the right audience, looking to the demographics (the ideal picture) of your desired customers and match them with the right platforms, so you’re not wasting precious time developing content and can get on with the selling.
Social Search Matters
People don’t just engage in conversations on social media. They also use the platforms for searching out your organisation. A well-developed profile will help your business rank within these specific algorithms, aiding traffic through to your website. Website traffic is an important factor in organic search results for search engines like Google and Bing, so the more traffic from social media you get, the more likely you are to rise in rankings over in organic search. It’s also important to remember that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, second only to Google. Yes, Google bought YouTube in 2006, but the social content sharing platform is still a separate website with its own separate search algorithm. Every second of every day, 1,140 searches are performed on YouTube. That’s a lot of potential people finding your content and, by extension, your business.
Using Your Top Keywords Sensibly in Social Posts
Google has gone back on forth on the matter of social media content (over the profile information itself) aiding organic search results. As it stands, content on any digital platform can help people to know what it is your organisation is all about. And search engine algorithms are getting more intelligent every day, but they still rely on the words contained in content to inform their results. You don’t have to be an SEO genius to understand what your top keywords might be. Just have a think about what it is your business provides, and think about the top 10 or so phrases your ideal customers might use to look for your services or products. That’s not the most sophisticated way of doing keyword research (and there are infinitely better ways of refining that list) but it will get the ball rolling on what can be very beneficial to your content adventures. Folding these words into your content helps them crop up more frequently in conjunction with your brand, meaning people are more likely to see the words and associate your business with them. That, in turn, aids your organic search rankings when people head to Google or Bing to search you out.
The main thing to remember is that all your digital efforts work in conjunction. It’s just like a huge web of interconnected threads that should all lead back to your main business presence, be that your website or Facebook page, or some other profile online where you do business. Social media doesn’t stand alone, and you can’t develop a strategy for social media as a stand-alone from the rest of your digital marketing efforts.
If you’ve got this far and it still all seems like too much work, ask us how you can use these tips to work smarter – not harder. We have packages for every organisation, starting from an audit of your current footprint to strategic social media management. Drop us a line and let’s catch up for a coffee today!
Blank Canvas Digital 