Today, I wanted to talk about the power of social media and how it has affected a lot of businesses online. To begin with, to leverage from social media is not a rocket science, anyone and any business can do it. The whole thing is about putting bits and pieces of the puzzle together – what you want is to target the right people and give them what they want, so in short it’s a game of needs and wants and how you present it to them. This all makes the good old social media into a social business where everyone is happy. The good thing about this is that the costs are very minimal. Social media networks are free to use for obvious reasons. So, why not generate business from them? The main theme of this article is ranking and generating business from social media.
Requirements
· An online presence
· A social presence on all major social media networks, the following are preferred:
o Facebook
o Twitter
o YouTube
o LinkedIn
o Google+
o Pinterest
· Dedicated staff to operate social media accounts – take it seriously!
Why You Fail In The Very Start
Getting to a good start is the most important and hardest part. In my experience, a lot of new websites launch daily and pick of the most competitive niches to market in – it’s not that they are offering cheap products or anything, but at times, rather I should say mostly the market is so competitive and is very hard to penetrate the search engine rankings – or to even rank for high end keywords for that matter. As we all know, the more a keyword is searched, the more competition there is on it. And this is where businesses fail to capitalize. You can’t just give up. I’ll share one of strategies with you, in this type of situation, which is very common these days is to keep targeting search engines (go for low end or long tail keywords first) but put more focus into social media. Social media has its own search results in the search engine result pages!
How Search Rankings Work
When I search for a something on the web, the search engine will present me with different type of search results and social media may be some of them. What happens here is that search engines, such as Google, count the number of impressions and clicks a search result gets and stores that data in its database. Now, it compares this with all other search results. The ones getting a higher ratio will usually get to maintain their rank. We will not get into how a website is ranked, as that is another subject and has a lot of factors associated with it.
How Social Media Rankings Work
When I search for something on YouTube, what do you think will show up in the first couple of results? That’s right, the videos that have the most likes, views and shares! And usually they come from the person with the most subscribers. The same goes for other social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. But this is not always the case. Why? Read on below.
Utilize Keywords in Social Media
Since social media does show up in search results, its best to utilize the keywords your website is targeting in your social media just as we would do in our on-page SEO. That is, the title, description and tags. If your video or any other page is truly optimized for your keywords it will certainly get a better chance to rank than most others, regardless of the amount of clicks or views. You can always have a link to your website so if your social media page gets ranked, mostly likely there will be referral traffic from it. I highly recommend a Social Media Expert to do this for you, they will not only take care of the keyword optimization, but also be responsible for populating your social media presence and generating traffic from it to your website! That is tough work made easy for you.
Tips
1. Raise your flag in the right places! Participate actively in social media; if it is YouTube, create video responses, leave good comments on other peoples videos, befriend others including people with a lot of subscriptions – ask them to review your business or video. Encourage people to like, share and subscribe to your content; give incentives for this purpose just to build the momentum. So all in all, you will get views on your videos/posts/pages from within social media, but also from search engine search results!
2. Share your pages/posts/videos on social bookmarking networks. Ask fellow employees and friends to vote up your story on these networks – it helps! (For example: reddit)
3. Use social media tools to filter out the specific audience you want to target. it’s better to have dedicated and targeted people in your follower list than having several hundreds who won’t matter.
