How to Use Social Media to Improve Link Building
Social media is not typically associated with SEO. But its benefits, where marketing is concerned, extend to your website. The right approaches will provide you with social media and link building strategies that work in unison. In turn, these could deliver increased site visits, brand awareness, authority, engagement, and sales. So, despite what you might currently believe, strategic use of Social Media can improve your link building.
You must be wondering how social media can improve your link building initiatives when Google stated that it doesn’t count social media signals when determining page or site authority.
Social media doesn’t directly impact link-building, but it affects it in many other ways.
Backlinks are a crucial organic ranking factor, and link building is an important method when it comes to backlinks. However, link building is challenging because you need to have a solid content marketing and outreach strategy to get your brand mentioned or linked.
On the other hand, nobody can deny the power of social media. From Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, to Youtube, social media has now become an instrumental part of digital marketing campaigns. With over 4.5 billion social media users, many knowing how to use every aspect of social media, it’s crucial to gain this business advantage.
How to Use Social Media to Improve Link Building
Most marketers look at social media and link building as separate campaigns. But that’s no longer the case. Learning how to integrate these two will give you that SEO edge.
The goal here is to use social media to improve the flow of backlinks to your website and increase organic search rankings. For the sake of this article, we’ll focus on link building.
However, these tips can also help increase your traffic and conversion.
1. Take Advantage of Communities
Social communities are online groups that can be found on social media platforms. Communities are huge on social media because they connect people who share common interests, preferences, characteristics, or goals.
Joining social media communities, such as those you can find on Facebook and LinkedIn, can help you expand your network.
The goal here is to get access to people inside the community to gain links outside of social media.
For example, joining “blogger groups” on Facebook will gain you access to bloggers and build relationships with them. You can even share your new blog or product page in the group, provided that it follows the group’s guidelines, and have people share it on their own websites.
2. Create Interesting and Engaging Content
Viral content has been all the rage, especially with the rise of Tiktok. When content goes viral, it’s shared everywhere on the internet, thus increasing brand recognition. This form of recognition may extend to increasing the backlinks to your website.
Although viral content has been everywhere these days, it’s not easy coming up with an idea for one. One factor that makes content go viral is that it draws out a viewer’s emotions. Viral content can either make people laugh, angry, distressed, excited, or joyful.
Emotions are what drive people to share content.
Every business wants to be noticed and wants to be listed on the top 50 or top 10 trending list for the day or month. But you must do your research and be socially alert so that you can come up with the right ideas at the right moment.
Here are some tips that you can use when coming up with an idea for content:
- Have a unique topic or idea (or at least, a unique spin on a popular topic)
- Make sure that your idea will engage, bewilder, or inspire any kind of emotion from the viewer
- Use striking visuals
- Make sure that people can interact with it. This can be a challenge, a quiz, or a funny meme people can share.
3. Always Update Your Social Media Page With New Content
Social media cross-promotion is important. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and other social media sites have a higher reach compared to a new or unknown website. If you just posted new content on your site, promote or share it on social media.
Posting your content across a number of social media platforms will amplify your reach and it’ll also tell people that you’re always doing something new.
You could repurpose a blog into an infographic, capture an image, or write a short quote and post it on your social media. Make sure that the caption lets everyone know you just posted new content on your blog and link it to your post or post a link on your profile.
4. Connect With Influencers
When you’re using social media for link building, one of your goals is to connect with people using social media platforms. Once a connection has been established, you can form partnerships where your chosen influencers can promote or mention your brand through their social media accounts and website.
A common way to approach an influencer when it comes to link building is through cold emails. This is a method where you email people you don’t know or haven’t engaged with before.
Social media makes an effective addition to your cold email strategy as it can be your first point of contact with a prospective influencer.
Influencers are always on the lookout for new collaborations, and they’re more likely to respond to you if they’re familiar with your business or have an idea about who you are.
Here’s how to reach out to influencers:
- List your prospects or preferred influencers. These are personalities who have the same audience as you or are followed by the people you’re targeting.
- Add or follow them on social media. Keep track of what they’re doing and be updated with their projects. This way, if they post about something that connects with your brand, you can instantly seize the opportunity to engage with their post.
- Don’t forget to like, leave comments, or share their posts while tagging them. Interacting with their content will get them to notice you and be familiar with you. There will be times when the influencer may follow back or comment on your repost. If they checked out your account and found something shareworthy, you may just find them linking back to you then and there.
- At some point, when you see an opportunity where you can partner with them, send them a private message, and then craft a cold email that contains your proposition.
- If the influencer is interested, you can then collaborate. They can share your project on their social media and website where you can expect to earn a backlink for your site.
Example of a cold email
Subject: Your Post About Online Branding and Identity
Hi, Christine.
I saw your post about Online Branding and Identity, and it’s a topic that I’m passionate about.
You seem to be creating posts surrounding that topic recently and this is why I’m sending you this email. I have decades of experience in this field, so if you’re looking for a contributor for a piece, I would love to participate as a writer.
Looking forward to your response, and would be excellent if we could keep in touch. You can read more about my work on websitename.com.
Have a great weekend.
Cheers,
Wendy
5. Getting Backlinks via Twitter
Twitter has gained more than 350 million monthly active users in just a decade. It’s a convenient platform for people who just want to see a quick summary of what’s happening in the world at the moment. If a tweet catches their attention, they can then click on the link (if there is one) to read more information about the topic, or do their own research about the subject.
Tweets are crawled and indexed by Google. This means that tweets containing your brand name and your link will appear on search results. This will enhance brand recognition, shares, referrals, and even traffic to your website.
When combining social media strategy and SEO strategy, have a specific landing page in mind. A landing page is a specific page on your website that you want your lead or visitor to land on after interacting with any of your social media campaigns.
Your landing page should be clear and straightforward with informative content and effective CTAs.
Improve Your Link Building Initiatives with Social Media
There are so many link-building opportunities in social media. The ones stated above are just a few of them and are ideal for long-term use. You’re building a network with influencers and like-minded individuals, these relationships can last for a long time.
To wrap it up, social media helps you gain links through content ideation, link prospecting, outreach, and content promotion. It helps you stay on top of what people are talking about and what they’re interested in. It’s a useful tool for prospecting influencers or bloggers you can partner with, and an excellent way to do outreach and content promotion.
Make sure to always provide high-quality content and include catchy hashtags, so people can share and find your content faster.
An effective mix of different digital marketing strategies is important to your online success, so you need to learn about as many strategies as possible. This way, you can grow and improve your company against all odds.
Dan Smink is the founder of C1 Partners, a Denver SEO company that helps small to medium enterprises with their digital marketing strategy. Dan comes from a background of 20 years in business leadership and has a track record of helping businesses achieve million-dollar revenue values. He is an active community leader and a contributor to the Forbes.com’s Agency Council spreading the word on how digital strategies can make a positive impact on today’s businesses. You may connect with him on LinkedIn.
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