Social Media for SEO - Goals

Social Media for SEO - Goals

The way we do business has changed. Not only do we have online businesses nowadays but with the arrival and widespread of social networks, businesses have become social. A business, especially one that sells to young people, now has to develop a social networking strategy to serve its customers with personalized service and improve its SEO at the same time.

I am used to using Facebook. In fact, my session is always open in my mobile device and I use it as one of my primary means of communication with friends and family that I don’t see often, interaction with communities that share my interests, and assessing the trustworthiness of a company I just discovered. For example, I am trying to change my Internet Service Provider so after finding some companies I could choose from the first thing I did was looking them up in Facebook looking for customer comments and reviews. If a company doesn't have an official Facebook page it’s easy for me to ignore it. If customers are happy with the company and mention it on the company’s Facebook page I gain confidence about their quality. If I ask the company questions through Inbox and their answers are useful to me, then I am much more likely of becoming their customer.

With these facts in mind, I came up with a list of goals for Social media and SEO:

Obtain ‘’Likes’’ and relevance. After I ‘’like’’ a company’s Facebook page, I will start seeing their publications in my wall and they will be present in my mind. The first step is to get visitors and potential customers to ‘’like’’ the company. A Facebook Ads campaing can be used for this. My first goal is to reach 100 Likes as a first stepping stone, then use an ads campaign and organic growth through interaction to increase its number to 500, and then 1,000.

Create content that is ‘’likeable’’ and ‘’shareable’’. Publications that are liked, shared and commented will have a greater and wider reach. Sharing content from related but not conflicting sources can also be good to keep social interaction up. The goal is to have at least one publication a day in order to remind visitors of my site’s existence.

Engage with the community. The Facebook page is the ‘’face’’ of the business where customers can ask questions and give suggestions. Friendly and warm interaction is the key for visitors to return. My goal is to answer comments every day, and invite people to interact if comments are scarce.

Expand your reach. I am not really using Twitter, Instagram, or other social media sites to promote my site other than Facebook and I have been suggested to try it. My goal is to open an account in those other sites and becoming familiar with them.

Success can be measured from this using Google Analytics. With it I can know how many visitors are visiting my site as a result of social media interactions (which is the first goal), and how many of those clicked Adsense ads. Links to Affiliate Networks can also be posted on social media publications advertising special offers.

Useful resources: 

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/08/social-media-optimization-redux/

http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/07/4-social-seo-success/