If your business is operating on a budget, it can often be a challenge to relate the effort that you are putting into building relationships on social media with the actual return on investment (ROI). If you’ve been spending a lot of time on social media, but don’t feel like you are getting the results that you expect, you might start to question whether the efforts that you are putting in are really the best way to invest your limited time and resources.
Unfortunately, very few people are able to find conclusive answers to the questions they have in their minds, which makes them more reluctant to jump onto what they see as the “Social Media Bandwagon.” While some businesses see the various social media platforms as a valuable and viable marketing channel for their company, others view it as a yet unproven and unpredictable distraction that doesn’t really lend itself to conventional metrics. However, this is just not true.
Make Friends While Selling Your Social Media
For many businesses who are looking to generate more leads online, social media provides numerous unique and powerful benefits, including the increased visibility of their brands, offering more in-depth insights into consumer behavior, and helping to build stronger relationships with their customers. In this way, engaging with customers and target audiences through social media has become one of the most critical pillars of any successful online marketing and SEO strategy. Keeping this in mind, here are some of the most effective social media practices that can help your business to build engagement, boost SEO efforts, and impact the bottom line of your business by helping you generate a significant number of leads.
Organically Increase Your Followers and Fans
The followers and fans that you gain through social media and the connections that you make through these platforms can have a significant effect on your overall ranking on Google and other search engines.
While building up a strong social media following in an organic way is a process that can take some time, it can provide you with a highly effective boost to your business and lead generation if you can maintain consistency in your approach. This means being able to keep a voice that is unique to your business when you are providing your followers with daily status and product updates.
To make the most of your social media networks, you need to position yourself and your business as highly responsive, by always making sure you post helpful tips, still being open to inquiries, sharing useful blog articles, and posting general items of interest to your target audience often. Make sure that you are able to follow this up by engaging with your target audience in direct conversations.
Direct and open conversations and engagements with customers will ensure that you are able to maintain a sizeable and interactive following because your current followers and fans will be encouraged to return. Social media also allows you to build subject matter authority that will eventually lead to you attracting more followers and fans, which will increase your potential leads.
Encourage External Websites to Link to Your Content
One of the most significant advantages that you can gain from including social media engagement within your online marketing strategy is that it makes it much easier to receive external links to your websites from a variety of diverse sources. When you can include diversity with your inbound links, it can significantly build your authority online and increase your search ranking on Google.
However, in order for you to gain different inbound links to your site from highly authoritative sources you must have high-quality, original, useful, and authoritative content on your site first. Otherwise, there is nothing for others to link to.
Assuming that the content on your website and in your blog is useful and unique, you should be able to use this as bait, while your social media networks are the fishing poles that ensure your bait gets placed in from of your target audience, which can then be used to reel in your followers and fans.
Optimize Your Social Media Posts
While the optimization of your posts on social media sites is heavily reliant on the pre-existing content that you are sharing, it can also provide you with the opportunity of creating a second search channel. As well as listing knowledge graph entries and news articles, Google often includes social media posts and updates at the top of its search engine search pages (SERPs).
While this is admittedly a temporary proposition, making sure that all your posts on social media are fully optimized will ensure that you are able to take full advantage of this opportunity.
To do this, you will first need something that you can use to anchor your post. This could be anything of interest to your audiences, like a link to an article, an infographic, or an embedded video. Whatever you choose to use, this will be the foundation that you need to title accurately and descriptively, using keywords, so that it will have a better chance of ranking in searches.
Encourage More People to Share Your Posts
In the same way that receiving external links to your company’s site contributes to your brand’s online authority, so does social sharing. When Google and the other search engines see indications that there are valid external endorsements of the content you post on social media, your chances are higher to receive an upward bump in your domain authority.
If ten people share one of your posts with their social network, that’s great, but you want to ideally by aiming for thousands of shares. Although useful or interesting posts will always have a handful of people sharing them with their social network, the best way for you to get the numbers you need to make a difference is to appeal directly to your followers.
This can be in the form of a reward, such as an entry into a drawing for a prize, a free product, or anything else that you think might encourage your followers and fans to share your posts with their social network.
Having a well-thought-out strategy for your interactions on the various social media platforms will allow you to quickly disseminate your content while you also build backlinks to your website. Social media can also be used to energize your content by making it a point of discussion among your fans and followers, which ultimately will help you build a stronger relationship between your target audience and your brand.
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