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Posted by Chetan Mistry
January 07, 2014
Social media could prove to be a great platform for spreading brand awareness. If used properly, the social media presence for a particular brand could be used to boost the SEO results by earning high-quality backlinks to a particular brand’s website.
Links are considered to be one of the most vital determinants for the search engines to decide how important, relevant and authoritative you are. More the number of high quality links, more the authority earned by your site and higher the ranking for your website on search engine results pages.
Out of all the ways to earn links, social media is perhaps a great place to get good link earning opportunities. Any approach that is similar to black hat or link farming is getting less effective as search algorithms are getting stricter. Aggressive self-promotion is a definite no-no as it could negatively hurt the rankings of a website. It is a proven fact that all resourceful content that provides value to the users, have definitely helped in the purpose of promoting a website effectively on search engines. It is thus required to create content that would propel the readers to share it with others.
The target audience has various likes; however records show that quality posts, statistics, well researched information, infographics and a new angle to an interesting subject are all the good points to get maximum likes and links. A good video that captures the attention of viewers is bound to get shared. This is one reason why a majority of brand and online marketers are now looking up to video as an essential part of content marketing.
There are more chances of an entertaining, original post going viral. However, it is suggested not to focus only on the entertainment value. A solid and useful post have an edge over others to become a linkable asset and provide long term returns. This is because it is being shared as a useful resource and people turn up to that particular content whenever needed, thus increasing the popularity of the content. If found authoritative, bloggers and other content writers would often link to your content rather than steal it and put it in their own words.
The quality that you give with your posts and the responses is vital than the frequency of the posts. If the post is valuable, people are more likely to link to it. However, coming up with frequent posts can build up your presence and authority in the relevant fields. Not all responses have to be minutely researched and over-explosive. Even adding some useful information backing up the resource, or even simply saying, “Great Post!” could prove to be beneficial. By building your presence online, you are just reminding the people that you are there and they could always come back to use and re-use your content, when you do come up with valuable posts.
Keeping an eye on the conversation and responding positively to their concerns would also help big time.
It’s good to provide a linkable content within the first few responses to a new blog or post. Being in the first five or ten posts on the very first page could really help get your content noticed.
It pays to target your efforts effectively as the time and resources are finite that you will be spending on social media. You would ideally want to seek the key influencers in your relevant field. This also means that your comments and posts may be in competition with others as well, however this is where the value could be built.
Most people have the hot-shots for Facebook and Twitter, however there is a lot of potential in store on other sites as well such as Pinterest, YouTube and Tumblr. If you are looking to market within specific regions, you might want to research on the most popular sites in these regions and direct your efforts towards them. For instance, VK is the most popular social networking site in Russia, while Facebook could help in reaching the targets in other regions.
There are n number of tools and application available to help in finding the best targets. For instance, Followerwonk offers the analytics for Twitter. This could help in sorting and comparing the followers by looking at their data such as the social authority scores and the percentage with the URL’s. One could also measure the reactions to their own tweets by monitoring the activity alongside the current follower numbers.
Fresh Web Explorer is one more tool that searches for mentions of the brand or other keywords and matches them with the feed authority. This could help in sorting the key influencers from those with less authority, allowing targeting the efforts more effectively.
It is quite difficult to predict the results of any campaign, as the links from social media are to be earned and could not be bought. Genuine earned links are very valuable and all the efforts put in to get them are worth it.
