Social media has become an important factor in Google’s algorithm calculation to work out the ranks of businesses in search engines. Webpages are likely to rank higher if they’ve been shared, ‘liked’, ‘followed’ and generally talked about on social networking forums. With the fast move towards the community branding in social media, people are looking to be recommended services by their peers, and social media is the crux and source of this recommendation service.

Many traditional SEO campaigns didn’t account for social media as it wasn’t considered by Google before. SEO was focussed on content, keywords, meta tags, title tags and several back end features of websites to boost a brand via its own platform. Now there are a plethora of services which the general public are using and your business should be a part of them.

You company doesn’t need to be on every single social networking site, no matter what SEO professionals say. It’s better to have a handful of solid profiles than an extended arm of half hearted ones. Keeping up to date with social media can be an overwhelming task if you’re spreading yourself too thinly as the constant stream of information means that changes have to be implemented every day to give a fresh feel to your content. Trying to do this for 20 sites is going to be a massive task or one that just doesn’t get done to its full potential.

So say you choose 4 great profiles and you’re updating them every single day, what benefits will this bring to your SEO campaign and recognition of your business? What’s the point?

Community Support

In this day and age, people are tired of faceless corporate entities. Consumers no longer respond to traditional marketing and are worried about scams and dodgy deals which turn out to lose them money. With this overwhelming paranoia, perhaps due to the failing economy, people are looking for a helping hand when choosing service; they’re turning to their peers for advice.

The great thing about social networking is that it provides that support for people. With discussion forums, the propensity to repost links and to share information, people are readily providing reviews and recommendations of products and services. This creates an online community of ‘cyber friends’ who connect and accept advice from people who have had a pleasing experience, despite the fact they’ve not always met in person.

Why does this help your business?

By having a social media profile, you can provide content and links for this community to share amongst themselves. With it being so simple for people to transfer information to one another, and the increasing trend of publicising individual lives, consumers are all too ready to tell the world when they’ve struck lucky. Perhaps someone used a particularly great online web video conferencing service and wants to enable others to use it – they pass it along via their own social media platforms.

With social networking, every time your provide and offer, valuable information or a service worth sharing, people pass that along within their own circles, generating greater brand recognition of your services.  

Additionally, it allows ‘fans’ of your services to write recommendations and reviews of your product so that other potential consumers can recognize what a great job you’re doing. People love a recommendation and frequently look to see if anyone can shed some light on the product they’re about to invest in. Social media communities provide the means to building up a review base for other customers to peruse.

An Online ‘Paper Trail’

Social media gives you another avenue to get your website backlinked. Every time someone shares a piece from your website, it creates a link back to your webpages and ultimately your business. By doing this, other consumers can trace back to where these recommendations or enticing articles are coming from and that generates a constant stream of traffic to your webpage.

Additionally, these backlinks are also taken into account by Google. Google will see that you’re not only getting your web pages URLs all over the internet, that they’re coming through organically and from recognized quality sources such as Facebook, or Google+ or Tumblr. This will contribute to your SEO scoring and will assist with attempting to secure those top search ranking spots on Google.

Real Time Assistance

With social media, you can make a name for yourself as a really helpful establishment. By giving consumers the ability to comment and query firsthand on your social networking profiles, it means you can attend to their needs directly and in a warm and encouraging fashion. So say you provide online web video conferencing and someone is having difficulty logging in, you can assist them straight away, rather than them having to postpone the meeting to wait for your response of help.

By responding to questions directly, consumers feel like they’re being valued and therefore are more likely to place their trust in your brand, with the understanding that you’ll be able to assist them if anything goes wrong. Furthermore, their query won’t be stuck in your email inbox or hidden away in spam and you can keep on top of all customer demands, and show the ethos of your business in a public domain.

About the Author:

SEO expert, James Martell is the go-to person for advice on getting up to date with business growth techniques and the technology to move forward. James works with many companies such as www.webconferenceclassroom.com and has managed to get many businesses from the dark ages of the typewriter through to the modern trend on online communication, turning them into recognizable global brands.