SEO & Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing & SEO Together

Social media is everywhere, and there's no doubt that social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn are among the most powerful social media marketing channels for building and advertising your brand online. But there's a catch. You've got to compete for attention and stand out from the ‘noise’ long enough to capture a targeted user’s attention. Without a clear strategy, knowing your goal and social media optimization (SMO) at every level, it's not only tough for your business to stand out, but to achieve positive results. The good news? With the right strategy in place, your social media pages can increase brand visibility, be a driver for content marketing and amplifying your content, drive traffic to your website, help you build meaningful connections with your customers (and potential customers), and increase your online goal objectives.

• Grow a Brand Community – Sometimes, the most successful brands on social make the whole thing look easy. But that effortless appearance can only be achieved with a lot of planning and strategy. Social media marketing is about more than what you post, or when you post it. It's a comprehensive plan that takes your audience, values, and goals into consideration, with an eye on long-term, sustainable success. Social media can be a crazy place, so building an engaged brand community starts with a clear plan.
• Put the Spotlight on Your Website – Your social pages are great for connecting with your audience, but ultimately you want that audience to visit your website to take the next step with your business. Creating compelling content that “lives” on your website allows you to engage your social audience by providing valuable information, and provides the perfect opportunity to drive traffic back to your website. Whether video, infographics, images, or informative content, know your audience and know what they will share. This a not only a social media marketing strategy, but an opportunity for optimization on every level along the user path.
• Real-time Marketing – Every moment on social media is a marketing opportunity. Your social connections visit your page to check out your latest content, but they also use it as a clearinghouse for questions, comments, and engagement. Social allows you to connect with customers at the moments that matter most, through convenient, familiar marketing channels that they already use everyday. Everything about your social presence can – and should – be optimized.
• Online Word of Mouth Marketing – The format may be different, but word-of-mouth referrals are still solid gold in the marketing world. Social media is a real-time online marketing strategy for communicating with your customers, an online word-of-mouth marketing resource, and brand ‘amplification’ for your business. When a customer shares your content or posts a positive comment to your page, they're implicitly telling their social connections that your business is worth a look. And those online word-of-mouth referrals have long-term benefits, because they live on your social pages for the world to see.
• Social Media Optimization – Just like you would invest the time to optimize your website and its content for more visitors and brand awareness, you should optimize your social channels. This is good on so many levels, but if for no other reason, it will provide your business brand ‘domination’ in the search results pages. Optimizing at every stage of the path is important. In addition to optimizing the social channels themselves, part of your social media marketing strategy needs to include optimizing your content that you are posting on social. This sets the stage for having visitors go to optimized landing pages, links back to your optimized content, and getting more quality social shares.