Social media is one of the best platforms to build brand awareness. When used the right way, your brand’s social presence has the power to amplify your social media strategy through earning quality back-links.
While others think that social media is useless for links, they miss the entire purpose of link building through social media. It is all about getting the links outside of social networks through the people that are inside them.
Links are one of the critical variables that search engines base on to decide how relevant and trusted your site is. Therefore, the more quality links you have, the more value is given to your website. As a result, this causes your website to rank higher in search engine results.
1. Build relationships with blog owners using social media
Being social and building relationships are important factors for your social media strategy. With that being said, it’s no different when you try to create links. Your goal is to influence webmasters, blog owners, and editors on social media to hit ‘publish.’ But this won’t happen right away. You still need to build a relationship with them first.
Building relationships may seem as easy as it sounds, it’s not. You need to engage people in a more natural, honest manner. It has to be personal. Earning links will only come from the people and contacts who trust you well enough.
While automating your interactions is a great way to achieve results, it can be counterproductive. Foster the right relationships, and this would, in turn, improve your rankings and build links over time.
2. Target influencers by tracking their social activity
Influencer marketing should be part of your social media marketing strategy. That is, collaborating with an influential person on social media to actively promote a campaign, product or service. It’s easy to spot these social media influencers as more often than not, they have a large, dedicated, and highly engaged following.
A survey from WhoSay relates that brand marketers and other agencies all agree that their influencer marketing budgets have increased this 2018, and a staggering 80 percent said the influencer marketing could make people feel positive about a brand or a product that it’s offering.
Once you find the right influencers, define what your target audience will be when you set up a specific campaign.
3. Find contents that are being widely shared in social media
It’s crucial to find the right kind of content that is widely shared across different social media channels. Ideally, don’t try to post everything, unless it’s one of the best material you have. An excellent content marketing principle is to let your audience be your guide.
Same is true when you post. If there’s no interest brewing in your followers, don’t post. It might be a bit of trial and error in your part at the beginning, but it will worth it once you already have the valuable insight on what your audience prefers, as well as what type of content that engages them, you’re well on your way to achieve positive results.
Same is true when forming interactions with your followers. Don’t talk unless you have something worthwhile to say. Instead, put out something that adds value. Once your content is out there, and it’s already starting to get a lot of traction through social shares, it will gain a lot of traffic.
According to eCommerce conversion resource, social shares play a very important role in showcasing social proof. The more earned media (likes and shares) you have, it shows how credible and trustworthy your content is to your readers. That way, you’ll be getting high-quality links.
4. Use social media to spot guest posting opportunities
Another fantastic way of building links is guest blogging.
Here’s how the entire process works ‒ you usually look people up on Google, see if they might be interested in a particular topic, contact them and get their permission to write a guest post on their site.
Through guest posting, you can gain an online audience. It’s excellent for search engines, builds relationships, and introduces your brand and business to new people. As long as you get the backlink, guest posting is valuable to achieve the results that you want. While this might sound relatively simple, outreach can take months.
So, connect with bloggers and start to engage with their content. Again, this is all about building interaction. That way, if you finally approach them with your request, there is a higher chance that they will accept it.
5. Utilize hashtags and monitor trends
It is essential that you also optimize your social media profile just like with your website. But how can a word or a phrase from these hashtags influence search position and SEO?
Hashtags help you get more exposure on Facebook. For optimal engagement, set the post on a public, and use 1-2 hashtags per post. Same as with Twitter ‒ the trick here is not to go overboard. On Instagram this is usually not the case, there is a seemingly endless use of hashtags (with an upper limit of up to 20 hashtags per post.)
6. Join Facebook groups to participate in community discussions (not sell).
Joining in social media forums like Facebook groups is a place where you can actively participate in discussions, give advice or give viable solutions to others, based on your expertise. In this way, you can subtly advertise your products and generate more sales.
Utilizing this type of strategy can help you connect and engage with potential customers.
7. Use social media as your distribution channel and showcase your expertise
Social media, due to its massive popularity, generate more buzz than any other distribution channels out there. So how can you gain better brand exposure? One way to inspire engagement is to come up with controversial content. Mostly, it has to be open to debate and can be seen from different points of view.
“How-to” types of content is another excellent way to generate your brand more attention and traffic. People turn to “how-to” advice almost every day, so make it instructional yet informational posts at the same time. It will present your brand as an expert in a particular field, which will ultimately, earn you more links and exposure.
Use social media to take advantage of every opportunity
More than just links, if you want to make your first sale, utilizing social media is very important according to this guide. Making friends on Facebook, networking on LinkedIn, doing conversations on Twitter, inspiring people on Pinterest and many more ways to use social media channels to your advantage.
In the end, you are doing link building to increase your visibility on search or for your target customers to find you and thus help you increase your sale and profit at the same time.