Grow Your Traffic by Building Relationships On Social Media
If you are an internet marketer working on a tight budget, it can sometimes be difficult to relate the effort you spend on building relationships with visitors on your social media pages with the actual Return on Investment (ROI). This may lead you to question whether the time you spend posting on your Facebook page or adding updates on Twitter or Instagram, are the best way for you to spend your valuable time.
What is unfortunate is that there are few people who are able to get satisfying answers to this question, and they quickly become hesitant to get into what they see as a ‘social media bandwagon.’ Although a growing number of marketers have come to view social media as a viable and important channel to market products and services, a lot of people still view it as a distraction that is unproven and unpredictable, since it does not conform to conventional metrics used by the marketing industry. Let’s explore this in more detail.
‘Selling’ Your Social Media Presence Allows You to Make New Friends and to Develop a Fan Base
As many online businesses that are looking to generate leads have discovered, social media marketing offers a unique set of benefits that include increased brand visibility, a deeper insight into the behavior of consumers and the opportunity to build strong one-on-one relationships with customers and prospects.
Because of this, engaging with customers on the various online social media platforms has grown into a key pillar of successful SEO and a powerful online marketing strategy. Having this in mind, we seek to examine social media tactics that have proven effective in building engagement, boosting SEO efforts and which have resulted in a positive impact on the bottom line of various businesses which have used these strategies to generate leads.
Build Up a Following Organically
When you gain followers on social media and make meaningful connections, the result is a significant boost to your rankings on major search engines. Although the process of building up a following on social media is a slow and painstaking process, it will pay significant dividends if you stay consistent. What is required is that you keep a unique voice whenever you give product updates, daily status reports or release blog posts.
One of the main ways to gain followers for you or your organization is to offer helpful information, share blog articles that your audience will find useful, be available to answer queries and post content that will pique the interest of your followers. You must then follow this up by having direct engagements and conversations with prospective clients and website visitors.
By having open and direct contact with your customers and prospects you will be able to maintain a large and interactive group of followers, since your current followers will not only return, but will bring you new followers who are potential leads.
Links to Your Content from External Sources
A key advantage of having social media marketing as part of your marketing mix is the fact that you can use it to attract external links into your website from a range of sources that you may otherwise not have access to. Your website authority on Google is boosted by having a diverse mix of external links.
What you need to note, however, is that if you are to benefit from a diversity of inbound links from external websites with high authority is that you should have original, authoritative and high quality content yourself. Without this, the external sources would not have anything to link to.
If you have useful and unique content to offer your audience, you can use it as click bait, and have your social media pages as the fishing poles, which will ensure that the bait is positioned in front of your prospects’ eyes to reel them in.
Optimize Your Posts on Social Media
While the optimization of your posts on social media relies heavily on the content you already have on your blog or website, it offers you a secondary channel. In addition to listing entries from Knowledge Graph as well as news articles, Google also offers updates of social media posts at the top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). While it is admittedly temporary, having optimized posts will ensure that you benefit from the opportunity.
Influence People to Share Your Posts
Social sharing has the same impact on the authority of your blog, website or brand as receiving external links. Whenever any of the major search engines notices that your social media content has been endorsed by a verifiable external source with authority, there will be an upward bump in the authority of your domain.
While ten people sharing your posts on social media is great, your ideal should be to have thousands of people placing your posts on their timelines. Although a useful or interesting social media post will receive some followers and shares, the really large numbers are down to having a post which appeals directly to your followers. A common way that successful social media marketers use to drive this kind of engagement is by providing a reward like an offer of free gifts or entry into a prize draw.
Conclusion
When you develop a strategy for interacting with followers and fans on social media, you can disseminate content quickly as you add backlinks to your blog or website. Using social media breathes new energy into your content by making it something for your followers to discuss and strengthening their bond with you.
Once you have a significant following on social media, it then becomes easier to leverage SEO and lead generation strategies to your advantage.
