Social Media SEO Strategy: Beginner’s Guide - AdMarketing Titan

Leveraging social media to drive results for the business is one of the most important and time-consuming processes to execute.

In fact, social media to gain conversions and leads is an everlasting process for any business.

According to Exploding Topics, 68% of marketers say social media marketing has helped them generate more leads.

In this article, we are going to learn how to leverage social media to get traffic to the website and direct attention towards the brand. These rules apply to all social media networks.

What is Social Media SEO?

Social media SEO includes practices like planning, optimizing, and posting text-based strategic content that helps attract better audiences, customers, or clients toward your personal brand or business.

The main goal of social media SEO is to attract the right type of audience and present the right type of content or offers.

 

Why does Social Media even matter for a brand?

While social media is a tough nut to crack, especially at first, over a period of time, after strategically planning and spreading awareness among like-minded communities and audiences online, social media can be rewarding tenfold and be a major revenue-generating stream for a business.

In fact, Bonobos, a clothing retailer was able to grow 65% using social media(pdf).

 

Impact of Social Media on SEO

Even if Google’s hands don’t go as far as to take big signals for ranking content on Google's search page, still you should consider social media to be a good ranking signal for Google.

Why?

Let’s look at some of the reasons why social media should come into consideration for your Google ranking temptation:

Increased visibility: Social media is an online place where communication happens not only between people but also between people and businesses, and vice versa. Therefore, businesses must have good visibility within their niche or the audience they are serving.

Social media provide an additional channel for your content to be discovered and linked to, which can ultimately lead to increased visibility and potential sales for your business.

Backlinks and Authority: Shares, likes, and comments on social media can generate valuable signals, especially to new people who have interacted with your brand for the first time. They are more likely to trust a business that has more engagement (positive) within their online community.

This can lead to more searches on Google and also can help rank the website more on the search rankings.

Additionally, the social media following and engagements can contribute to your website’s perceived authority by search engines.

Brand awareness: Social media is where people hang out.

Therefore, for a business to build a strong presence on social media to increase brand awareness and recognition can become a fundamental way to bring in more revenue for a business.

This can lead to more branded searches and improved SEO return for the work being put in.

Social media sharing and virality: Highly shareable content on social media, be it short videos, long videos, or posts can be a great way to generate more visitors to the website and increase the authority of the website.

The viral content on social media attracts a greater number of backlinks and mentions, which can significantly improve the search rankings.

Now that the reasons have hopefully convinced you, let's talk some strategies to get going on social media.

Strategies for Dominating Social Media

The world of social media is competitive more and more and it’s hard to be on the losing side of the game.

Also, people don’t just follow other businesses for one good post or image, more so than often, people would be doing quality checks on the business and only then would decide on pressing the follow button.

Therefore, as a business owner or a social media strategist, you need to optimize your presence and make sure that your brand’s name remains on top of the mind of the customer. It helps in both greater visibility and brand awareness.

Let’s jump into strategies that would help you get better reach in the world of social media:

Social Media Profiles:

While standalone posts can generate brand awareness, fostering a loyal following requires a recognizable brand identity and a foundation of trust built through transparent communication.

A brand with beautiful posts but without a good-looking profile is like the first-ranked student of the class who never attends classes. It always seems mysterious.

As a result,

People will not trust the brand very easily.

What can you do to get the last mile, that is, get them to follow you:

a.      Clear profile pic: The profile pic should reflect the face of the brand or person. It's important to have a connection with the viewer within the first glance of the profile as a profile pic is the first thing that the person sees after landing on the account.

b.     Clear messaging with the bio: It’s a great place to express your missions and values. Through the use of emojis and texts, you can clearly state what you or your brand stands for.

c.     Clear Call-To-Action (CTA): If you have something to offer such as blog content, a new video, or even a lead magnet, place link(s) to the relevant content.

There’s more to creating a good profile bio for social media.

Read more: How to Craft a Good Optimized Profile for Instagram

Posting Updates Regularly:

Posting feed updates such as posts and carousels, as well as short videos and long videos.

Algorithms are designed in a way that rewards consistent content creators.

If you keep creating content regularly that is both engaging and helps people stay on the platform to check out new content, algorithms consider them better suited to grow them more quickly.

According to Hootsuite, Instagram likes 3 to 5 posts a week, while Facebook 1 to 2 times a day.

On X (formerly Twitter), which primarily is text dominant space, requires social accounts to post multiple times a day to get better reach.

Improving your social media creativity:

Even if you are the most giving person in case of knowledge or information, viewers are already used to great editing and quality presentation.

Therefore, to catch their attention (also for skimming through the content), one has to use a sense of graphic design and text formatting.

There are great resources on Google, YouTube, and Instagram that would provide simple ways to level up your design game with minimum work.

Social media buttons:

You need to be encouraging the readers to share the content that you are sharing with them.

One of the better ways to encourage them to do the same is to add social media sharing buttons on your blog.

Content Marketing Institute uses this tactic to get more followers for their brand.

They do easily shareable quotes, especially on X (formerly Twitter), like the one shown below.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

Another example may include:

Courtesy: Hubspot

Engaging with your audience:

Social media engagement is one of the best metrics for social media algorithms to understand whether you as a social media account owner are a human being or a bot.
Let me explain.
Whenever you are responding to your audience and answering their questions or joining the conversation, the algorithm takes notice of the engagement and suggests the posts to a greater pool of people.

However, it’s important to note that the algorithm does not respond well to bot-like answers for everyone. It’s important to add value to the conversation and interest the reader in the process.

Using relevant keywords:

By adding relevant keywords to your text content such as post descriptions on Instagram and Facebook can help algorithms understand what the post is about.

This helps algorithms understand what the posts are about and helps the post reach more like-minded people.

Repurposing content:

So, repurposing content is one of the most time-effective and easiest parts of content creation.

If you have long-form content such as podcast or blog content, you can easily take bits-sized important parts of the longer form of content and create shorts.

·       If you have long-form video content, use online tools like Opus Clip to create short-form content automatically (yes with a click of a button).

·       If you have a podcast, take the audio and use free royalty royalty-free video from video-sharing sites like Pexels and Pixabay to use it for Instagram reels or YouTube shorts.

·       For blog content, take the main parts of the content, make carousel posts for the Instagram feed, or make a YouTube video that will gather views. Make use of ChatGPT. Take the blog content, copy and paste it to ChatGPT, and ask it to make bullet points for Instagram carousel posts.

Consistent branding:

Big brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Amazon, and so on despite being a long and dominant player in their space haven’t been changing their colors.

Why is that?

This is because there are people who have associated the primary brand colors with those brands. Therefore, it’s always advisable not to change the branding frequently and easily. Stick to one color scheme and try never to change it.

Think, how would you feel if Starbucks changed its primary color from green to red whereas Coca-Cola changed from red to green.

People are less likely to associate themselves to the brand and worse, change to other brands.

These were some of the strategies to get social media SEO done right.