Social media has an obvious benefit; of allowing you to share your content with thousands of followers – and just the idea of thousands of followers can be good for business.
However, small businesses all over the world have discovered other reasons that social media contributes to the growth of their ROI and sales. Nevertheless, there are still skeptics who don’t really get social media, or understand how it can benefit a business in many different ways, but especially in the ranking of a website, and ultimately in the traffic that views the content you put out. So, without going through a lot of rigmarole, we put a list together of the top 10 reasons why social media will always have to factor into your business rankings.
These 10 reasons will turn skeptics, even someone like yourself, into real believers of the benefits of social media for business.
1. It lets you connect to your audience and learn about their buying tastes
You just can’t deny that the key to your success is knowing your customers. You’ve probably done this type of study in your store or business by conducting surveys, or even asking customers about the quality of your service, yet you probably never thought that social media could be a real asset in bringing you this type of insight.
Today, social media actually makes it possible for you to understand your customers better than any other medium available. Tools like Facebook insights and Twitter statistics help you find out things like – languages spoken by your customers, their age, gender, location, and even their other interests.
Knowing this can help you target SEO for your website and ad campaigns in a more functional way – whether you are targeting to an online audience or a physical one. This knowledge allows you to choose better keywords on PPC, and determine the type of content you need to place on your website. In the end, knowing your audience gives you a better return on your investment, no matter the type of advertising you use.
2. Geo-targeting is more effective with the help of social media.
When you work with SEO processes for any length of time, you’ll see the value in using geo-targeting SEO tactics (targeting an audience within a specific geographic location.) This is a great way of sending your message out to customers within a certain location. Still there are some industries that make it hard for you to rank on the first page in Google, even when you only want to rank for a particular local city. Social media networks can help in this area as they are large content sites that can easily get a first page listings for particular keyword. So when you use geo-targeted keywords in social media content you can get this to list higher on the search engine index websites.
3. Target specific audiences.
Social media marketing also lets you target specific industries, audiences and even languages. When using these platforms there are tools that allow you to communicate the right kind of content to a specific audience. For instance, you can target by location, language, gender, age, relationship status, interests, education and even countries.
4. It can help you find new customers and even expand your audience.
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter allow you to locate current customers and even seek out potential customers with new location or within certain geographical areas.
For example, if you open up a restaurant in a particular neighborhood, there are tools that allow you to locate anyone tweeting about certain foods, beverages like coffee within that area (for example, with Twitter). You can reach out to these users and send them to your own content. This creates more traffic, can create backlinks to your website, interests and that’s what the Google bot looks for, which in turn, will increase your own websites page ranking.
At any rate, offering information that is being talked about on the social media platforms will index your information on the search engines under your social media accounts. So one way or another you get your information indexed higher on the search engines than your competitors.
5. Increase Brand Awareness
You can increase your brand awareness by receiving feedback from your customers on your social media platforms. Other potential customers seeing this positive feedback or interaction will become a part of your audience, and take note of your business and of your brand. Brand awareness is another factor that brings in traffic, back links and search engine content recognition.
6. Improved Market Intelligence
Again – social media platforms offer important insights. What does this mean? It means you can get key information about your competitors, and use that information to influence your website, your content, your social media interaction, your keywords for PPC ads and more. For example, you can create search streams to monitor mentions of products, services or competitor’s names. Then based on those search results you can improve your business by offering something your competitors are not offering.
7. More Traffic
I think I’ve mentioned this once before, however let’s give it a go again. Social media brings you more traffic. This means your website is more than just the digital calling card. People are actually visiting it to get answers to their questions. This increased traffic increases your conversions, shares and links to your site. Ultimately, this increases your search engine ranking. So when people retweet your information, share it on Pinterest, Instagram or Facebook – that information is more likely to rank higher in the search engines.
8. People can read your content
Social media platforms allow for you to easily share content with other users. In the past, SEO specialists had a problem getting content to reach customers in a short period of time. With social media, you can share all of your content quickly, and specifically to the people interested in your business, people in your industry who can then share your content with their contacts and friends.
9. Social shares are a new way of link building
Link building has always been important to the search engines and they use this to determine whether a website is worth giving a higher page rank. For years we all used several different link building tactics, both credible and illegitimate to get more links to a website.
Today, most links are achieved by creating original content that is shared across social media. Links to content from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn help the search engines understand whether your content is credible or not.
In other words, if a link is tweeted about many times as opposed to a link that is never tweeted about, it will have higher visibility in the search engine because the search engines consider it to have better content.
10. Author Authority
Since the launch of Google Plus, the search engine has integrated with content authority. So when an offer associates his or her content with his profile, the author listing will appear in the search engines and will build up credibility for the content.
Bottom Line
Participating in social media brings you a lot of benefits as a business. It brings great SEO benefits and helps you get your content in front of a lot of viewers very quickly. However, there are certain platforms that work best with your content, that’s why you want to participate on more than one social media platform. Give us your opinion. Which social media platform seems to work best for you?
I’ve seen changes in SERP rankings that we can only contribute to social metrics.
Great post Abhishek ! Thank you for sharing reasons that will force to focus more on Social media marketing.
We have a very short comment . Our Team spent time studying this Article last night and was thrilled with all the points you mentioned. I knew your article would be a joy to read and you did not disappoint. Very valuable and clear post. Just saying I like your style and thanks!!
Social networks are an indispensable and indivisible elements in the seo . You must always be taken into account.