With the amount of content exchange happening on social networks these days, it’s only natural that many companies are looking to get their products and ideas marketed through these channels. The potential to directly reach consumer influencers alone is almost invaluable for any business looking for a new communication channel.
Social SEO has recently become a much talked about concept after Google announced its intention of recognising social signals more often for their weighting algorithms, rather than link signals.
As a business though, with this type of SEO being a novel and decidedly ambiguous concept, how does one begin optimising one’s presence in these networks? Particularly with the extreme aversion consumers have commercial offerings on social sites.
Internal Factors
You may want to begin with a simple SWOT analysis of your current social presence. Ask yourself questions like:
* Who am I reaching at the moment with my social networking efforts and do these people trust me?
* Are these consumers my target market?
* How easy is my content to find on these networks?
* How actively engaged am I with my followers? Do I publish interesting content frequently?
* Are there any structural problems with my page that’s preventing proper indexing?
This analysis should help you establish where you currently stand and where you want to go. A good automatic tool that evaluates your influence on social networks is Klout.com
Competitor Analysis
Now that you know where you are, you need to know where everybody else is. Investigating competitor strategies is an age old principle and, if done effectively, can provide you with invaluable business intelligence and some possible opportunities for future business practices.
* Where do you rank in the organic results, compared to competitors.
* The degree of SEO your competitor’s already doing.
* How do they rate on the key success factors of SEO.
Knowing how they perform in these areas can influence your future social SEO strategies.
SEO on Your Profiles
Social SEO isn’t as well understood as traditional SEO. Search engines are yet to factor them into results and social sites pay more attention to how many followers or the recency of activity when ranking the results.
So trying to affect your ranking in results may be challenging at first. You’ll need to constantly tweak and assess the results. Some simple thing you can do though:
* Include brand names in your posts
* Always link your Facebook and Twitter page to your website.
* Optimise your posts on Facebook to get as many ‘likes’ as possible.
Google+ is the only social site currently, that let’s you search through all the content. But it would be prudent to be pre-emptive. Using the above strategies will mean you’re prepare for the incoming social signals that be weighed by Google’s algorithm in the future.
Relationship Development
As the term social networking might suggest, all content on these sites is transmitted through relationships. From a business perspective, this means you operate in a very personal environment built on familiarity, trust and respect.
Exploitation of these relationships can severely harm your reputation and possibly crash your entire social media campaign. The policies and common etiquette vary subtly from site to site and may require extensive observation of these before deciding to launch a campaign.