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Planning Your Social Media Strategy

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social-media-strategy

A solid Social Media strategy has become a key component for any successful digital marketing campaign. With Social Media sites steadily gaining popularity, major search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing have no choice but to take them into consideration when displaying relevant search results.

Posts on Instagram and Facebook or even tweets on Twitter don’t necessarily rank well in search results but Social Media brand pages and profile pages definitely do.

How should you decide which Social Media sites to focus on for your business? We will walk you through some steps to help determine which sites will make the biggest impact on your Social Media strategy.

 

What Social Media strategy compliments your business

A good starting point when planning your Social Media strategy is deciding on whether or not a particular social medium is one that you actually want your business to be found on. Essentially, does the Social Media site fit the image you are trying to convey for your business or brand, does it reach the audience you’re trying to target.

Sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide a number of easily accessible ways to market your brand and business to your followers but other Social Media sites can be more of a challenge to generate similar results.

It’s important to consider how the Social Media site is perceived by your intended audience and to make sure it’s in line with the image you would like to convey for your business or brand.

 

What Social Media sites do your target audience use

It’s important to know which Social Media sites your target audience use, as different people are more active on specific Social Media sites. Developing an understanding of your target audience’s Social Media habits will require some due diligence but your extra efforts will definitely pay off.

If you have a primarily young audience you will typically achieve the best results focusing on Social Media sites like Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Tumblr. However if your business mainly provides services to other businesses then you will want to establish a strong presence on Linkedin.

 

Social Media every business should use

Currently there is one social medium that shouldn’t be ignored regardless of the type of business you operate, Facebook. Why? Let’s take a look at some numbers.

Every month, Facebook has approximately 1.5 billion active users. 1.5 billion users translates to roughly 20% of the world’s population using Facebook every month. This incredible amount of traffic means that no matter what your target audience is, they are going to be active in some form on Facebook.

 

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Every business should have their own Facebook page and whenever you create a new blog post or new content it should be shared on Facebook. This allows all of your Facebook Page’s followers to see what you’re sharing in their timeline.

If your website is built on WordPress you can easily set it up to automate the process of sharing new content for you. Your followers will be able to share, like or comment on your new posts increasing the overall exposure to your content.

In summary, it’s easy for a business to waste resources on their Social Media strategy by not taking the time to plan their strategy properly and by focusing on the wrong goals. When planning your Social Media strategy ask yourself what target audience are you trying to reach, what Social Media site’s are inline with the image your business would like to convey and which Social Media sites can you reach your target audience on.

 

 

 

Things You Need to Know About Social Media & SEO

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Over the past few years the state of SEO has changed dramatically thanks to several massive algorithm updates from Google, this has resulted in a shift towards content becoming the new SEO king. In the past ranking for a particular search query could be as simple as focusing on singular keywords but now it’s far more important to focus on keyword intent and the search user’s needs using long tail searches.

In a marketing report published by Econsultancy entitled the State of Search Marketing, it mentions that 82% of agencies and 72% of companies surveyed stated social media marketing is an intricate part of their SEO & digital marketing strategy. Ironically, shortly after Econsultancy published the data from it’s report, Google released a video claiming that social signal metrics (Twitter followers, Facebook Shares/likes, etc) are not currently used to determine search engine rankings.

This claim by Google came as a bit of a shock to most marketers as there seemed to be a mutual assumption that social signals were in fact a significant factor used in determining search engine rankings as they help to reflect a companies trust and quality.

 

Some Things to Consider On The Impact of Social Media on SEO

 

Links on Social Media Sites Can Still Boost Your Search Rank

Many internet marketers believe that backlinks to your website from social media accounts do in fact have a significant impact on your rankings. Developing unique content and linking to your content from Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media sites provides search engines more information that can be used to help determine a website’s credibility and how relevant they are for a particular search query.

 

Profiles on Social Media Sites Rank Well

Even though social signals, shares, likes, etc might not impact your website’s search engine ranking, social profiles most certainly do. Social Media profiles are typically among the top search results when searching for a company name or brand. When a person is researching businesses they’re not familiar with they will commonly go straight to their twitter or facebook page, so accordingly if a social media profile is among the top results they’re just as likely to click on the profile as they would be for the businesses actual website.

Social profiles make a difference with Google and also to the people who are trying to find your business online. Marketers should definitely take into consideration the fact that a Google+ profile is commonly one of the first things someone will see when searching for a business online and as a result it is important to not only have a Google+ page but also to ensure that it is current and populated with rich engaging content.

 

Social Media Sites Are Also Search Engines

In today’s internet it’s common for someone to skip Google and Bing completely and perform their search query directly from a social media site to try and find what they’re looking for. As such your SEO strategy should include focusing on the searches that happen directly on social media search engines. If someone wants to get a good feel for what your company is about, the average person will perform a quick search on Facebook or twitter to determine what type of online presence your business has.