Integrating Social Media on Your Website
For SMBs who don’t have the budget of enterprise-level companies, which can reach millions of readers through paid advertising, increasing your social media presence is crucial for success.
A strong social presence can help strengthen your brand’s story with its highly-visible, interactive and sharable components. And the more people you engage with through your social channels, the more brand awareness you’ll achieve. This will drive more traffic to your website more often, which will also help your overall SEO efforts and provide a higher return on investment.
Following are some simple tips to help build your SMB’s social media presence.
Everything Begins with Keywords
Keywords are the foundation of any successful SEO strategy because they establish a link between the content and the intended audience through search results.
Since these search words are the direct digital links to your content, they should continue to be your main priority when creating content not only on your website but also in your social posts.
It’s also wise to use those main keywords – say “social media ROI” – in hashtags within your social content. This will further help strengthen your visibility opportunities from new audiences searching for content through those hashtags.
Aligning your SEO and social media keywords also will offer continuity to your brand voice and anchor your reputation in the digital community.
For businesses that target a local market, such as food in a certain town or pest services in a region, optimizing your Local SEO keywords on social platforms will also help your searchability. Local keywords are based on exactly what the title intends – location. Cities, counties, regions, and streets are high on the local keyword lists.
Social Content Must Be Sharable
Shareability is the key component of a successful post. The more sharing a post gets, the more visibility it receives. This can lead to a post going viral, which should be the ultimate goal of every social effort.
By thinking of your social media presence as a marketing opportunity, you can leverage your social campaign to create brand awareness and establish your digital reputation.
Each post is an opportunity to offer accessible snapshots of your brand that encourage your audience to interact, and share. An optimized social media post should:
- Begin with a strong foundation. Successful posts start with a strong video or picture paired with optimized descriptions that feature keywords and hashtags (check out RiteTag for the most popular and trending hashtags). Posts should maintain a consistent brand identity, which includes voice, tone and style of writing. Additionally, a few posts per week should link your audience to your original content to drive site traffic. Again, social is about interaction, so don’t self promote too much.
- Encourage participation and incentivize. Social posts are meant to be liked and shared. To encourage more participation with your intended audience you can call upon them for help. Incentivized audience interaction can include competitions and giveaways. Incentivizing your audience helps them to invest in your brand story and can encourage likes and shares.
- Engage in the local community. Location-specific posts offer the opportunity to engage with a specific audience and offer visibility in local searches.
- Post with frequency. Relevance in social media is crucial. The more you post, the more relevance you have in the social media realm. Each post is an opportunity to increase brand awareness and engage with your audience.
Optimize Your Website with Social Media Profiles
Yeah – this may be one of those “duh” moments, but many businesses forget to add their social media profiles to their websites. Enhancing your website to support your social media presence is crucial to branding success. This sounds simple, but many businesses don’t have their social media profiles integrated on their websites – especially smaller local businesses.
You can achieve this simply by adding widgets to sidebars and including all links to you all social profiles on each page. Platforms like WordPress make this super simple. Being conscious of your social media platforms on your website will help to link both your social media and SEO marketing.
Concluding Thoughts
Social media is essential to the development of your digital marketing strategy. All search engine optimized content begins with a focus on keywords to drive search results. So should your social content efforts.
Building your social presence through the tips above is key to influencing your brand’s story, and increasing your digital-marketing ROI.
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