While links posted to social media do not directly impact a website’s Google search ranks, there are ways proper social media use can indirectly help SEO rankings. This relationship between social media and search engine optimization is nuanced but significant. Consistent and useful content posted to social media platforms is what indirectly helps or hurts your search engine rank. When you regularly share valuable, engaging content on social channels, you increase the likelihood of attracting attention, generating shares, and encouraging discussions around your brand. This increased visibility can lead to more people discovering your website through social media, potentially resulting in higher organic traffic.
Having a reliable following on social media can help drive quality traffic to your company’s blog and website. As your social media audience grows, you create a larger pool of potential visitors who are already interested in your content or offerings. Utilizing social media to connect and interact with your potential and existing clients undoubtedly creates an improved relationship between the company and its customers, which often leads to better sales performance. This enhanced engagement goes beyond just sales, though. It can also contribute to increased brand loyalty, positive word-of-mouth marketing, and a stronger online presence, all of which can indirectly boost your SEO efforts by increasing your brand’s visibility and credibility online.
Why should you use social media to help your company’s search engine ranking (as a company and an employee)?
Creating quality content for your social media pages, that consumers can engage with, is the key to using social media to help your search engine rank, and to improve your overall presence on social media platforms. Much like the content on your SEO-optimized website, creating or repurposing digestible, informative, and inspiring content will help you get likes, comments, and most importantly shares. Shares from dedicated followers will help build brand awareness and expose your company to potential customers. Having more shares will help generate backlinks, one of the most important factors in your search engine ranking.
Essentially: (Great content -> Increased Shares -> Increased Website Traffic and Backlinks -> Better Search Ranking and More Sales)
Backlinks (a.k.a. inbound links) are defined as links from other websites that point to your website. Backlinks are important in SEO because, when other websites link to your pages, this signals to Google that your page is providing useful and helpful content to search engine users, and thus will earn you a higher index rank. The more backlinks that you have from reputable sources, the better your site is perceived to be by search engines.
Note: Links shared on social media sites DO NOT count as backlinks. The concept implies that building awareness of your site, product, and resources, through social media will get your website into the hands of people who will link to your pages from their website.
Since so many people use social media, it is important to properly utilize it as a tool to reach a wider audience, and ultimately gain natural backlinks.
How To Build Your Social Media To Help SEO
Where should you post (as a company)?
You will want to target the social media platforms on which the majority of your target audience is based. Knowing which platforms your target audience uses most will help you better allocate your resources and efforts, so that you can make the best ROI from your social media efforts.
Where should you post (as an employee)?
Contributing to your company’s social media efforts, individual employees can repost company posts or curate their posts related to company business/events on their personal LinkedIn and Facebook pages. These are the platforms that people typically use to post about their work life, but you are welcome to post on other platforms as well.
What type of content could you post on your social page (as an employee)?
It is helpful to build brand awareness in your closer network of family and friends to help gain traffic for your company’s website. Posting content such as blog posts, company events and outings, and current projects that you can share with the public, are great ways to help support your company using your social media.
When posting about your company be sure to:
- Take a look at your company’s social media policy for best practices
- Create a short but meaningful caption to describe your post
- TAG your company page for that social media platform, and any coworkers that were with you at the event and/or worked with you on the project
- (Optional) Use 3-5 hashtags that apply to the topic you are posting about
You can also try to make sure your posts are consistent with your company’s branding by:
- Using terminology and language consistent with your company’s guidelines
- Utilizing visualizations and imagery provided by your company for public-facing purposes (ex. Graphics, slides, etc.)
What type of media should you post to which platform (as a company and an employee)
Each social media platform typically performs better with different types of media. However, you can use the same content in multiple types of media. This way, you can get the most out of one piece of content, while you are ensuring that the media you post to each social platform fits with what the audience of that platform is receptive to.
A dedicated social media manager or social media team, that are experts on the type of content that is posted to each platform, can help you to understand what kinds of posts you want to put out on each platform. (Employees: If your company has individuals in this position, it is helpful to reach out to them with questions, otherwise, a quick online search can usually get you the answers you need.) For example, YouTube is a platform dedicated to more long-form video content, where you could have your social media manager create an informational video based on the content you want to distribute. On the other hand, an infographic or an informational slide carousel is a popular format that is used and reposted/shared on Instagram.
The most popular types of media content posted to social media platforms are blog posts, short-form videos, infographics, podcasts, and long-form videos.
The New York Times also has a helpful article that can guide you on what to post on what platform: https://www.nytimes.com/guides/business/social-media-for-career-and-business
Using these resources to determine what type of media to post on what platform can help guide your posting journey. Additionally, utilizing the same base content and creating multiple types of media with this content, allows you to post the individualized media to each social media platform on which they perform best. This strategy can help you make the most out of your content-building and social media growth efforts.
Social Media And FourFront
You may now be thinking, what can FourFront do that will help with our social media optimization? Well, we have a variety of data collection and analytics tools in Our Toolbox that we use daily which help us understand if your company and employee social media efforts are helping your website’s search engine ranking.
We monitor our clients’ traffic that comes from social platforms, and from this, we can make conclusions about what recent social media efforts by your company are reflecting in your website’s traffic. This is also something that we note and provide in our monthly analytics reports.
We can also provide a more specific analysis of what social media platforms are ranking in search results related to queries that your website also ranks for. In this, we can guide you on how to optimize your company’s social media pages to appear as a search result for branded and non-branded keywords AND provide recommendations for which platforms you should be focusing your efforts towards.
We highly encourage you to have fun and be smart when posting about your company online, and try to be consistent with your efforts. Optimizing your social media pages and activity can have great benefits to your website’s search engine ranks, and help in driving brand awareness and sales.
