Online Marketing in Australia is a social exercise like it or not. If you know much about SEO, then you would appreciate that there are so many different elements that all come together to create your Rank according to search engines – this is widely understood to include your content, links, keywords and ratings – but the impact of Social Media is an area that is booming into the light and causing many SEO agencies to scratch their heads.
Think about social media; it is a rapidly expanding social platform in which to engage with your audience in a human and responsive manner. To put it all in perspective, there are over 1,413,000,000 active Facebook users, over 1,113,000,000 active Google+ users and over 305,000,000 active twitter users with, on average, 9,253 tweets per second. This is an enormous quantity of information being accessed and created by people from a diverse and easily accessible platform.
Social
For most small business owners, social pages like Facebook, Instagram, Google + and LinkedIn are pretty easy to update and maintain even for the most computer illiterate out there. A weekly update on these pages is not a huge task. It puts a face to your business. Just a word of warning, a great rule of thumb is to make sure that whatever you put up there is something that you would actually want to read. Don’t put what you had for breakfast on your Facebook page no one cares! (Unless of course your breakfast is what your message is like a dietician etc).
Social Media doesn’t act in the same way that a normal page does. This is because social signals from Twitter and Facebook are not used by Google. This is because, if it did, problems would arise if Google’s attempt to index the pages was blocked by Facebook and Twitter for privacy reasons. But for the most part, social media pages are treated the same as any other site, but a few exceptions exist to this as well. The issue with social media is, at first, confusing, but we hope to try and make it clearer exactly why this is a key principle in modern SEO.
‘Social media marketers that partner with their search marketer counterparts are finding success by focusing on the content that fuels social media activities and analyzing trends to unlock opportunities and maximize impact and revenue. Jim Yu, CEO, BrightEdge
There are a number of key benefits that a solid social media presence can bring to a company that takes this area seriously in their SEO campaign. Some of these more significant benefits are:
Increased awareness of your brand:
If you use social media strategically and on the right platforms, you can grow your brand. It is a fantastic way to join the conversation in your industry, introduce your name to potential customers and start building the sorts of relationships that will grow your business.
Makes you seem more human:
For the most part, you want to create a face of professionalism so that your company gets the respect that you want at the top of its field. However, through social media presence, you can try and balance the professionalism with an ability to talk to your customers on a human level that they can respect. It lets conversations evolve more naturally and organically, which can have good results.
Responsiveness of Social Media:
Because of the nature of social media, you have the ability to respond and listen to any feedback to your product and services. This allows you to harness the value of the two-way conversations and interact with your customers. You can engage in practices of ‘social listening’ so you can monitor your brand and even influence the products you release or the stylistic changes you make.
Word-of-mouth marketing:
By using social media, you can further your campaigns and events through simple word of mouth. If it is exciting enough, or original and engaging, a natural process of sharing and commenting will spread the word through an engaged social media audience.
Unique Medium to communicate:
The concept is one which it truly unique. It is a low cost, low barrier, simple method to directly communicate with your customers. It is a brilliant way to reach out whether because of a sale, announcement or just day to day activities. An active social media presence can provide cheap and easy marketing.
Customer loyalty:
Social media can build your reputation, and by extension, customer loyalty. As you gain more recognition and trust as a quality and reliable company customers who are regularly exposed to your brand through social media will more deeply interact with you, your updates and develop the loyalty that translates into sales.
So by now you should know that Social Media is critical to your SEO campaign, so get Posting, Tweeting, +ing or whatever else there is out there!
If you need to know more about Social Media, visit our website: http://www.internetmarketingexperts.net.au/