SEO, Social Media Marketing
Which Social Media sites to use for improving your Website’s SEO (Part 1)
An underrated tool for SEO, here’s how and which social media site you should use to improve your Website’s SEO
A strong presence on social media can many times be overlooked by many entrepreneurs and bloggers for enhancing the SEO and ranking of their website. But on the other hand, Social Media is such an overwhelmingly massive tool with countless possibilities to explore, such that it comes under a category of its own when we talk about online marketing; it is called Social Media Marketing.
My experience with my former blog came with many ups and downs, but I feel grateful enough to have learnt something from each and every experience I got through the years, that eventually pushed me towards a career in Marketing. I’ve shared my story and the reason why Social Media is important for your Website’s ranking in the article shared below. I’d suggest you read it for context.
When it comes to starting with your social media marketing, there is loads to cover. Today, we look at social media solely for the purpose of Search Engine Optimisation. This series is will be divided into two parts.
Part 1 is about the various factors to be kept in mind while making your decision of which social media site to choose.
Part 2 will be about the various social media sites you can choose from, what they are famous for, the audience demographic of each, followed by a few marketing tips based on each site.
Let’s dive in!
Social Media comes with endless possibilities. Needless to say, it is a commitment every marketer and entrepreneur needs to consider, in fact, cannot afford to overlook. Looking at social media from the perspective of Search Engine Optimisation, there are tons many social media sites that can help you with increasing your website’s ranking.
If you’re an entrepreneur starting with your social media marketing, you’ll need to keep your efforts focused on just 2–3, at most 3 social media channels.
Here are a few things you need to consider if you are thinking of beginning with social media marketing, choosing from many social media platforms and want it to enhance your SEO:
Your Business/Blog Type
First and foremost, it is always wise to look at oneself. When it comes to the “type” of your blog or business, what you need to look at is the product, service or content you are offering, the aesthetic and tone of your brand, along with the vision and the mission you carry.
Not every social media platform will suit your mission and your brand. The key is to be aware of what your brand requires and what will be best for it. This awareness can best come with a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) Analysis. You can do a SWOT Analysis for your brand, then move on to doing an analysis of each platform and match both to find the optimum solution.
Your Marketing & SEO Objective
Your SWOT Analysis will become the basis for all the answers to all your questions henceforth. After determining the type of your business or blog, the next main issue to cover is to work up your marketing objective (what do you wish to gain from social media marketing) and match this objective to what each platform can help you achieve.
Your Marketing Objectives can be:
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Engagement
- Conversions
- Store Visits, etc.
Your business may adopt all these goals or may adopt some of them, that’ll also depend on how the strengths and weaknesses of the respective businesses will play out.
Let’s say you have a small online business of candle-making. Further, let’s assume that your business’ biggest strength is focused customer service because of less number of regular customers and the biggest weakness is competition from bigger corporations that sell cheaper products. This would suggest that you need faster conversions and larger reach/brand awareness as your marketing objectives.
As the next step, you need to match which platforms can help you achieve these goals the fastest and in the cheapest way. Again, stick to 2–3 channels only and not more than 3, at least as a start.
Your Target Audience
Now that your marketing objectives are set and we’ve ticked all the boxes on being self-aware about the type and potential of your business, it’s time to look at the main external factor of the business: your customers. But before they become your actual customers, they’ll be your potential customers or target audience.
Just like every business has a certain demographic that it serves, each social media site can have a certain type of user base that it attracts. For example, Medium attracts bloggers and writers, Instagram is full of content creators and influencers while Facebook users include mostly Gen X and millennials.
Start by doing a check on your product: whom does it serve? You can also do this by studying the current customers you have, what interests they share, what is the most common thing about most of them. When you have certain information accumulated, organise this into 2–3 different customer personas that your product serves solutions to. Here’s how you can cut out various personas.
Random Customer Persona Example for a random product: Women within the age of 18–30, who like to travel (mostly solo), with an average income of $$$$ per annum.
Next, you need to do research on the user base of each social media platform and match that to the target audience of your brand/product. For example, if you want to reach Gen Z, try marketing your product on TikTok.
Tools for Advertising & Conversion
Lastly, you need to test out the Marketing potential of the channel, i.e. what tools the social media site offers for you to take your business to the next level. Think of TikTok Ads, Instagram’s Business Tools or Facebook Shops.
Then again, you might not have access to all these tools straight away (eg, Facebook Shops is only available in some countries) and at times, the channels won’t have any tools and you’ll have to stick to subtle tactics of marketing to tap into a certain customer demographic (channels like Reddit and Medium. Some of them might be paid and some might come free.
Matching all these features to your product’s requirements is the last step for you to make the decision of which 2–3 platforms you want to focus your marketing efforts on.
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