Social Media and SEO

Social media and SEO will probably be the most talked about marketing media in 2013. SEO has been around for a very long time and most marketers are now channelizing their efforts to build an efficient online SEO strategy for their brands. Social media revolution has erupted in the last few years and now business houses are beginning use these previously “fun” networks for brand promotions. The latest trend is to devise a long-term strategy whereby both, social media and SEO complement each other. So, basically we are talking about one well-defined mechanism comprising the two.

Search engines are constantly improving their algorithms with a singular aim to provide the most relevant results for a particular query from the user. Hence the latest trend is that of “social search”. Where by your search query will fetch you results based on some shared social connection or interest of yours. So, basically your query will be prioritized with respect to your social media interaction. For instance: try searching for a friend of yours, or any random person or company and check the search results. They will be reflection of your social media activity like a Facebook, Twitter, Linked or Tumblr profile.

A very basic way to amalgamate your SEO strategy with your social media campaign would be to incorporate social sharing widgets into your blog. With this simple tweak you encourage your online audience to share information. For instance, imagine the number of links that are shared by your friends on Facebook from authority websites. Some of the days, you will notice the same link being shared by multiple friends and it remains on the highlights throughout the day. This is a classic example.

Simply put, you tend to read the “interesting” links or posts shared by your friends. Now, if you can have such friends or fans sharing your content, wouldn’t it truly get a bigger audience? Hence these people who tend to share content are your influencers. You need to cater well to your influencers who will happily share the “interesting” content you put up. The guy in charge of your social media profile needs to be engaging with the influencers and constantly give them new information.

Catering to your influencers is key. You owe them a “thank you” for sharing your information. If it’s a product you are selling them give your influencers certain privileges like demo or preview. You don’t need to dole out perks like a paid service for free because it defeats your purpose.

You need to be extremely active on Twitter and Facebook. I’d suggest not merging the two profiles because Twitter is more about real time interaction. It’s about commenting and voicing your opinion about the trending topics. You don’t have to tweet incessantly about your products. Jokes and fun images tend to get viral quicker. Try being witty!

Keep the serious stuff for Facebook – like stats, info graphics and other data driven content. Posting on Facebook with the same frequency as tweeting can annoy a lot of your fans and hence is avoidable. The Google bot is now indexing Facebook comments, hence you have to be very careful when you comment. Ultimately if you have compelling content, both SEO and social media will keep driving sizeable amounts of traffic to your website.