We preach a holistic marketing strategy here at SerpLogic, even if our business is focused on SEO products.
In our time we’ve spent a lot of time, money and effort honing our social media marketing presence, in the hope of benefiting our SEO one and it has worked. Posts we shared on both Conor McGregor and President Donald Trump’s internet marketing strategy went viral, gained us some great coverage and got us some awesome links.
Social media can be a blessing for those doing SEO if used in the correct manner and we’ve got a number of tips on where you should start and how you can utilise your social channels for big gains.
First things first:
Are your social media profiles setup the right way?
The first thing you need to think about when setting up your accounts is whether you set them up as business accounts or personal accounts. Both choices have pros and cons, especially when it comes to Facebook profiles. Business profiles on Facebook are known as Facebook Pages and make it easy for you to reach your target audience by creating/building campaigns around the page. But since they cannot be used to start conversations, they somewhat limit your options for creating personalized content.
One strategy that proves to be effective and which allows businesses to profit from the benefits of Facebook pages without suffering the cons thereof, is combining business profiles with personal activities. To do this, make sure you create and post unique and valuable content on your Facebook Page and share it from your personal profile, or that of one of your employees. Doing so will allow the post to reach even more people and to impact the credibility of your business and of those in your company who share it.
With personal profiles, you must update some of the more important details such as your profile photo, especially when it comes to LinkedIn. This is essential when trying to make new relationships and connections, regardless of your goals as a business. Once again, you need to ask yourself if your profile looks professional.
When extending your outreach using a business or personal profile, it must appear trustworthy and professional so that it proves effective and inspires confidence. Take a minute and consider your profile – does it read like a brand or person that you work with?
Set Clear Objectives to Determine the Way Forward
It can be very tempting to launch social outreach campaigns as you try to build your brand, get shares, increase your followers, find guest blog opportunities, and so forth. However, while shooting for the stars does sound poetic, you might find yourself (it happens a lot) flying close to the sun and crashing in the sea.
If you want to charter a way forward, you should settle for one objective and use it to inform and guide your campaign. A well-determined goal will make it easier for you to identify prospects to reach out for and how you can execute it.
Let us have a closer look at how you can build your brand with social outreach. Say you are an e-commerce entrepreneur and have just started a store, but its social media footprint is still very poor. Your main should be to increase your Twitter followers and create a presence for your brand.
To do this, start by identifying potential customer segments then create and share content that they’d like to see. The best way to start your campaign is through appealing to the market you are targeting by sharing content that you know your consumers value.
Once you’ve crafted the right content, find social influencers who you can use to engage with and share your content to ensure your name gets out there. Do not scour Twitter randomly for prospects. Reach out to specific influences and start building genuine relationships with them. Once you have established rapport, request them to share your content with their followers – some may even do it for free if you make a good impression.
As time goes by, track your engagements and follower count. Also, work on ensuring that your relationships with your influencers continue, even if they decline. Considering that you are building a brand, there is no benefit in burning your bridges.
Increase Brand Exposure
As we have seen so far, social media is a highly-effective distribution channel that creates a lot more buzz than most of the distribution channels available today because of how massively popular it is.
However, having a social media presence alone is not enough for brand exposure – you have to work out ways to improve your brand’s exposure on social media.
This will include creating content – and it works especially well if you know how to craft controversial content. Your content needs to be able to start debates and should, therefore, be disputable from several points of view. The key, however, is not to present counter-narratives or ridiculous arguments that go against your brand’s voice – that is just controversy for the sake of it – but to create posts that inspire a level of engagement that generates enough buzz to get your business some attention, and ultimately, more traffic.
As an expert in whatever you sell, you should consider using ‘how-to’ content. The least you can do for your audience on social media is present them with knowledge. People are constantly looking for ‘how-to’ information every day, so cater to this demand by producing informational, accessible, and instructional posts. Doing so will help present your brand as an expert on the subject matter, earning you more exposure and links.
Find Platforms That Your Potential Audiences and Partners Use
According to Buffer’s blog, it is vital that you know the platforms that get the most traction for content creators and publishers in your space. What type of content gets shared a lot? Who are the influencers and thought leaders that have the most traction in the fields you are in? Take time to find out which personalities or brands within your sphere get the most content shares and try to build a relationship with them. As you continue, you will find that each of the channel available is best suited for certain types of content. To improve your outreach strategy, make sure that all the content you share is in a format that is conducive for sharing.
Connect with Influencers and Journalists
When trying to build more links, a lot of people tend to use an approach known as ‘cold email’ to contact influencers and journalists. This approach normally involves emailing people you have never engaged with or spoken with before.
While this approach does work, you will enjoy more success by first building a point of contact or a relationship with the persons you want to connect with.
The best way to go about this is by using social media, and platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are especially useful.
Your goal should be to build rapport with influencers and journalists in your industry or niche.
Journalists are always looking for contributions, stories, or opinions on topics they are writing about. If you have valuable commentary or input that you can provide them, chances are you will get a mention in their article in the form of a link back to your site and a quote.
How to connect with influencers and journalists:
Take note of influencers and journalists in your industry or of people who’ve created content related to your industry before.
Once you’ve done that, add or follow them on social media. Remember to keep an eye on what they are posting or writing about. When they post an interesting tweet, picture, or story, make sure that you engage them.
Keep in touch with the influencers and journalists you follow, and you will start to understand the things they like talking about and the topics they often cover.
At some point, you will start to see opportunities where your own expertise or what you do is useful to them. Don’t be afraid to share your own opinions or thoughts, or to mention content or a story you are creating.
If the bloggers and journalists like your thoughts, they might get in touch with you for your opinion on a matter or a quote. In most cases, when these influencers use your input, you should expect a link back to your site.
Post Content that Adds Value and Gets Their Attention
You must make the content you create work for you by amplifying it across various channels. This way, you will have a greater chance of reaching a more diverse audience over some time.
Unless you are posting your best content, avoid posting all of your content. There is one content marketing principle that you should consider abiding by, and that is letting your audiences’ interests be your guide when creating content. The same applies when choosing content to post. If content has no interest, then do not post it.
The same also applies when interacting with your audiences. If you do not have something worthwhile to say, then don’t say anything or look for something relevant to talk about. Let’s say someone you identify as an influencer poses a question in a LinkedIn group you are in, if you know the answer, then respond. However, before answering, consider how you are going to frame the response. It might be that you plan on writing a reply and linking back to a page on your site where you have explored the question in depth. Perhaps it is an infographic or a blog article or some visual you have created that answers the question. It might even be an answer to the question itself.
Social media has become a crucial content distribution channel. Once the content is out there and is generating substantial engagement through social shares, it gets traffic. Traffic is one of the main metrics that Google considers. Social sharing provides social proof, which gives content greater credibility and makes it more trustworthy.
The number of shares and likes you get from your audience builds social proof. This, in turn, makes your content credible and makes it look more trustworthy. As a result, your chances of getting good quality links increases.
Social Automation
Outreach campaigns on social media require coordinated and diligent efforts that run concurrently across the various platforms you are on. Staying on top of all threads can be straining, especially if you are a small business with a small team.
Automation can help relieve this stress. Today, we are seeing tons of social automation tools popping up that are both effective and affordable. Reaching out to your influencers and scheduling direct messages and social posts can all be automated, saving you time when running your campaigns.
For instance, instead of manually sending messages to all the influencers on your list, you can automate the entire process and DM uniform, heartfelt messages to more than one contact at a go. Most of these tools allow you to personalize your message with the names of the influencers you are targeting, giving your outreach a human touch.
Maximize Your Hashtags
Never underestimate the power of a hashtag. Scouring your industry for hashtags both nationally and locally can help you identify the trends that are currently happening.
Trending hashtags are good waves to ride since messages can reach a lot more people when hashtags are trending on social sites like Twitter. Depending on the platform you are posting on, make sure that you follow the general guidelines for hashtags generating the most engagement on the platform. For instance, photos on Instagram with eleven hashtags tend to get the most engagement while on Twitter, it is tweets with one or two hashtags.
When scouring through hashtags, keep your eye out for influencers within your industry. Influencers range from micro (with up to 100,000 followers), middle (with up to 500,000 followers), and macro (with up to 1,000,000 followers.) To ensure your venture remains cost-effective, consider aiming for micro-influencers as they are usually willing to post content with value for free or for promotion. Each shared article, photo, tweet, etc. generates link backs to your site.
Contests for to Build a Presence
Contest posts are shared quite easily. Create a compelling-enough contest, and you’ll see your social media traffic spike. However, what a lot of people do not know is that these shares can also increase prospects and links. As a marketer, consider including important links in your contest posts to generate buzz and increase exposure.
Contests can be an awesome way to increase exposure and get people sharing your links on social media and also on blogs. There are numerous studies that testify such a thing can gain you dozens of links.
Creating Contests for SEO? Here Are Some Quick Tips for You to Consider:
- Check contest regulations on each social media platform you are planning on using and in your country.
- Create contests that direct traffic back to your site or which help create content for it.
- Make sure that you have unique contest identifiers – something like a hashtag or term that you have created for participants to use.
- Try and make sure that you turn contest participants into your fans on social media – request them to follow your page so they can participate.
All of these tips will go a long way to help you create the presence you desire and grow your blog via social media and also through Google.
