Marketing strategies for Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) have taken a new form by switching over to social media platforms. Though social media has nothing to do, directly with your website rankings, indirectly, it has created effects on SEO. According to Cognitive SEO, websites that have higher rankings also possess a good social media presence. Social Media websites themselves have huge traffic on their websites and applications. Hence, it is a strategic move to take marketing to social media platforms to boost SEO. Here. we are to discuss five ways to optimize social media marketing for SEO.
1. Social Media Friendly Content:
When it comes to SEO, content is king and strategically designing your content to be social media friendly, can make your content, quite popular in social media circles. For this, you need to design and create content that has the most compelling headlines with an emotional touch. Social Media platforms are popular because they are all about people sharing their emotional and compelling stories. Creating such content will make people share your content with friends and other social circles.
You should add relative images and visuals/animations to attract more traffic on social media platforms. While creating your content and defining keywords, keep social media trends in mind. Use, hashtags and trending now topics to market your own products through content that is based on these trends.
2. Influencer Marketing on Social Media:
This has grown to a much larger marketing tool than it was years ago. According to a survey on Mediakix, 80% of marketers find influencer marketing effective and 89% of marketers suggest that Returns On Investment from influencer marketing are comparable to any other channel. While 71% of marketers say that the quality of traffic and consumers, achieved by influencer marketing are better than other sources.
Currently, the most popular social media platform for influencer marketing is Instagram, with 89% of marketers preferring Instagram for their brand marketing. The top three most effective content formats are Instagram Posts (78%), Instagram Stories(73%) in close second, and YouTube Videos (56%). With active users growing by more than 4 percent in the past 3 months to reach an advertising audience of 895 million active users around the world, Instagram has been at the top for advertising and marketing platforms. The highest number of followers currently on Instagram is of Christiano Ronaldo, with over 180 million followers. Imagine a sports brand that can market through Ronaldo and influence a large pool of his followers.
Image source: hootsuite
3. Live Video Marketing:
One of the few marketing tricks that are popular these days is live video marketing. For content-driven websites, this option might not look a good one. But, in fact, you can utilize it too. You can arrange live expert discussions and learning sessions on topics that you are creating content about.
Further, for new product launch and announcements, live video marketing is a great tool. While you may provide a backlink that redirects the viewers to your website, only 37% of viewers prefer watching a live video on official websites. You can have your developers to create a live video feed on social media platforms that can redirect it to the official website. You should ask your the quality of video as about 67% of viewers prefer a live video of high quality.
One of the most interesting facts about this report was that 80% would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog, and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts.
4. Social Media Events:
Social Media Events are important tools to keep your audience hooked to your profile. The latest trend on social media platform Facebook is to organize a watch party, which is actually a video posting event. Similarly, you can invite your followers or audience to your social media events that can be anything from product launch, new content post, expert dialogue, etc. Such events are a great way to include new audiences into your marketing campaigns.
5. Shareable Links:
This can work both ways, and you can add social media sharing buttons to the blog posts and content on your website and on the other hand, you can provide backlinks to your articles in your social media posts and profiles. The use of such interlinks can create larger traffic for your websites and boost your SEO. Further, if you have a product that can use promo codes or rewards program, you can use such shareable links to encourage referral programs for your audience.
Wrapping it Up:
According to We Are Social, worldwide social media user numbers have grown to almost 3.5 billion at the start of 2019, with 288 million new users in the past 12 months pushing the global penetration figure to 45 percent. Social media use is still far from evenly distributed across the globe though, and penetration rates in parts of Africa are still in the single digits. GlobalWebIndex reports that the average social media user now spends 2 hours and 16 minutes each day on social platforms – up from 2 hours and 15 minutes last year – which equates to roughly one-third of their total internet time, and one-seventh of their waking lives.
All this data indicates the importance of social media in our lives and as a marketing platform to build larger audiences with the power to attract more traffic to websites and boost up SEO. Marketers too prefer social media marketing over other channels now to attract more traffic and also it provides quality traffic. Social Media has powerful presence in the digital world and that can be tapped by social media marketing.
