Social Media and SEO
For those who don’t already know, simply put, a social media listening/monitoring tool crawls the internet and social platforms and finds mentions of your brand/company/product/CEO or any other valuable keyword.
Social listening is famously used for a great number of things: improving customer service, increasing brand awareness, preventing social media crises, building the brand’s reputation online, and better understanding the customers (market research). The connection between social listening and SEO isn’t quite that straightforward.
1. Keep an eye on the sentiment
- Google looks at brand mentions on social media
- Google analyses the sentiment of this data
- If the data is significant, Google might use it as a ranking factor.
2. Turn linkless mentions into links
Social media listening tools aren’t just about social platforms. As mentioned before, they find mentions of your brand or any other keyword on blogs, forums, news sites – all the pages that Google definitely crawls. With a social media monitoring tool, you can find these mentions and contact site owners or the authors of the article to add a link to your site. Given that they’re talking about your brand already, they may not mind helping you out with your link building strategy
3. Find influencers of your industry
Online influencers are users that became popular in a specific category (e.g., technology, makeup, cooking, etc.) and build a large following of people who listen to their every word on that specific category. Finding the relevant influencers is a great idea for a large number of reasons, most of which are about product promotion and word-of-mouth. However, it’s about link building too (which is not surprising, since all these things are madly connected).
4. Increase website traffic
The most obvious result from a reach social media campaign is the increased website traffic. Website traffic is one of the most important SEO factors and one should strive to achieve it in any possible way, including social media. In times when the organic reach of Facebook and Twitter posts is gradually getting lower, a social media monitoring tool is probably the most effective way to get more clicks.
5. Keep an eye on linkless mentions
Finally, let’s go back to the initial purpose of a social media tool. It’s there, first of all, to keep an eye on linkless mentions. After all, you can find links with any SEO tool, and you can find social mentions directed at your brand with Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc notifications. It’s linkless mentions that these kinds of tools are after. They show you how their growth changes over time, where they come from, what their sentiment and demographics are, and so on.
