Is Social Media The New Search Engine Optimization?
In January of 2014 Matt Cutts, the head of Google SPAM team, released a video clearly stating social signals do not play a role in how results are ranked, but thousands of SEO’s were creating their campaigns around the fact that social signals do play a role.
Then a few months later, he said social signals are considered when it comes to SEO, by that time everyone already knew that, and even if it were not true, social media was a major source of targeted traffic and customer connections, so it was beneficial either way.
Is Social Media Worth The Effort?
YES! In fact, social media is the new search engine optimization. So, the first piece of advice is to ignore all the hype coming out of Matt Cutt’s mouth. Big and small brands, big and small bloggers, ecommerce, and sole marketers use social media successfully to get traffic, and build brand and an effective and extraordinary online presence.
Social Media Performance
- There are 3 billion active Internet users worldwide and 2.1 billion people have social media accounts
- There are 1.65 billion active mobile social accounts around the world
- There are almost 1.4 billion registered users on Facebook, which means that 47% of all Internet users are on Facebook
- 5 billion likes are generated daily on Facebook
- There are 316 million monthly active users on Twitter with 500 million tweets per day
- The +1 button on Google+ is hit 5 billion times per day
Social media is important. It is by far one of the best ways you can spend your marketing dollars. When it comes to sharing and distributing content social media, developing your brand and engaging leads, it is the way to go.
What you have to understand is social media is a search engine too. More and more people are using sites such as YouTube and Twitter to do searches. They use them the same way they use Google or any other search engine. They type in what they are looking for and read over the results. In addition, social media allows companies to interact with their customers and prospects in real and instant way.
Google not only cares about how many followers you have, a confirmed ranking signal, but, they also care about the content you have on your social pages because they index content on social pages. If they didn’t care about the content on those pages, they wouldn’t index it.
Depending on your goals, Facebook, Twitter. Google + and Pinterest are all top hitters in the social media marketing arena.
Social Media Marketing Tips
- Make sure to include social share buttons on your site’s content pages so to provide the most opportunity for them to be shared.
- Create content that is ultra-useful and such that can go viral, which, can not only create mass traffic flows, but, can greatly increase the amount of shares that content gets.
- Stay active on your social networks.
- Connect with an audience, and consider their needs before your own marketing needs. Social media is about connecting and conversation, and overly aggressive campaigns can easily be viewed as SPAM.
- Post new content at least once a week.
- Don’t leave those following you wanting more and not getting it, it’s important to pay attention to them.
- Display your authority and expertise by posting useful and valuable content, and never assume that people will tolerate low quality as they can easily unfollow you and tell their friends.
- Reputation management is of utmost importance as social media makes the world a small place. Be thoughtful about what you post, when you post and what you say on these platforms. Remember, for online business, bloggers, and brands reputation is everything and can quickly affect your online presence and consequently revenue streams.
- Use their feedback to not only improve your social pages, but to also improve the content you post on your blog and other places.
Final Thoughts
The internet has become extremely social. In addition, while it’s not about having the biggest social following it is about having a social presence. The social web has an enormous impact on your overall search engine optimization.
No longer should you focus on trying to game or trick the search engines. Instead, you should join in on this social revolution and capitalize on it.
