Community is the best SEO you can’t buy.

Social signals are a key ingredient in modern SEO.
In the age of “fake news” authentic, verifiable stories are becoming an increasingly important marketing commodity.
Just like in “real life” what people are saying about your brand matters.
What your friends are saying means a lot more than a random stranger’s opinion, although ironically, even a random strangers opinion means more than what the company is saying about their brand.
Because everyone assumes that companies lie.
Word of mouth, peer review, reputation management…
No matter what you call it, there is a simple truth in business.

Real people, sharing real stories about their positive experience with your brand will drive awareness and build your brand faster and cheaper than almost any other marketing method will.
Stories are increasingly important for online marketers.
A “stories war” is being waged between Snapchat and Facebook on all its platforms, (Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram). Even Apple has waded into the fray with its newly released “CLIPS” app.
Understanding intent from those stories and being able to use them to influence your immediate circle of friends will increasingly be the way that social networks leverage their data to help further monetize their traffic.
This means that for SEO, as well as for general marketing, thinking beyond the keyword search and into the social arena is increasingly important.

#Hashtags are and increasingly important metric
They’re used by both search engines and real users to surface content as well as curate their posts or to make a statement.
Google and other search engines have placed much more importance on the use of social signals like hashtags as a measure of how to rank content in search engine results.
How to engage your audience to tell their stories or WIIFM
“Leave a review” is not the most inspiring call to action and part of the reason that most companies struggle to get engagement.
What’s in it for me? (WIIFM)
As you likely know, the FCC and other national regulatory bodies have made giving incentives for your customers to leave reviews much harder in recent years and major companies like Amazon are cracking down on “fake reviews”.

Gone are the days when you could throw up some short, more or less anonymous testimonials by “Bob in Nantucket” with no picture.
Also gone are the days of sending out free product samples in return for leaving reviews, even if you don’t specify they have to be positive, you can’t use them in your marketing without full and clear disclosures that they were given free products in exchange for their review (which sort of looses a huge part of the validity) as people will tend to have a bias and feel obligated to leave a positive review.
So what’s a brand to do?
How can you make it more compelling for a user to review your product or service?
First of all, get more creative than simply asking for a product review, that’s boring.
Make it more engaging by wrapping it around a story model, not a review.
Encourage your audience to share HOW they use your product, WHY it helps, WHO they use it with, WHAT was a funny thing that happened because of it.
In other words, get creative.
Reward the sharing, not their story.
In terms of incentives, focus on the sharing aspect instead of the story.
Sharing by your audience is basically crowd sourcing the job of building socially relevant links back to your site for you.
While you can’t reward them for the story itself, you can reward them for things like getting the most shares, likes or views on their stories.
This is also easier to do if it’s not a straight up review of your product of course but rather something a little more fun and creative.
Please share any examples you might have of real customer story based social campaigns in the comments below.
If you’d like help setting up a user generated content program, don’t hesitate to reach out for a free consultation or signup for our platform.
