social media – Copy Chops

If like me, you grew up in the noughties, then social media will have come of age around about the same time as you did. And boy, what a wild ride it’s been right?

Upon its fledgeling debut into the big wide world, your Facebook page was more of a safe space for fangirling over Leo, uploading an entire album of photos from your digital camera after every night out, or writing cringe-worthy inside jokes on each other’s walls and timelines – now, it can be a powerful marketing tool.

Since then, the world of social media has become a little bit more sophisticated. US President numero 45 activity excluded of course. Apps have become smart-phone accessible, keeping users insatiably engaged with such a vast amount of features that it is simply impossible to keep track of them all. And, although the tweens of the current not-so-roaring twenties might prefer to spend their time online lip-syncing to the words of TOWIE stars on TikTok* some mainstream platforms are a pretty great place to advertise your business and interact with prospective – and current – customers.

*other short-form video blogging sites battling hefty lawsuits have always, and will always be, available

Even though the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have been comfortably sitting on our phones, laptops, and tablets for a while now, many still do not know how to properly utilize them to promote their business appropriately.

Now, as we’re all pretty much glued to our devices and willingly offer up our valuable user behaviour to the data-collector powers that be, it’s only fair that you’re able to use a little social media nature vs nurture to your own advantage.

Here are a few tips to help get you started…

1. Create a business page

Not to be confused with a personal page like the one you already have; a business page is the most compliant and effective way of easily promoting your business online. Simply log in to your FB/Twitter/Insta account, visit settings and select ‘create new page’ (or similar)

To get started you’ll need to upload a profile picture, cover photo, and basic info about your business. This is easy enough to do by yourself, but keep in mind that in order for your page to look super slick and be easily found by customers, you’ll want your bio and imagery to be optimized…

2. Optimise your content

Optimising your page means writing an about section and social media posts that will engage your audience and provide useful information that search engines can easily pick up and rank. To do this effectively you’ll need to understand your audience and create posts that they’ll find interesting and useful, consistently encouraging people to like, share and engage with your CTA’s.

3. Be active

To make sure your business page is working hard for you you’ll need to be consistent in your activity on the platform. This means participating in groups (public and private) and posting regular updates with a variety of content types including personalized imagery and links – you’ll also need to make sure you’re frequently replying to customer queries and comments, even the bad ones.

4. Promote events

If you’re a local business, using Facebook to promote an event for your business is especially important. Be sure to use all of the tools at your disposal to attract people to the event. This can include creating an event group, sharing teaser or countdown posts, and even planning an ad campaign around it. Most people check their Facebook app multiple times a day, so don’t miss out on the chance to engage with people who are quite literally waiting for something to tune in or turn up to.

5. Interact, interact, interact

This might seem pretty obvious for social media, but it really is a must if you want to see any real engagement or traction from your online community. Make sure you answer questions, respond to comments and participate in conversations that are happening online to ensure that your posts are showing up to your followers, and theirs.

6. Stream events

In the current climate, hosting real events or attracting customers to a shop or place isn’t realistic. Luckily, you can now host events virtually via the ‘live’ option across most platforms. This allows you to interact in real-time with your audience, safely. This is another great way of promoting your business because when you go live, all of your followers will receive a notification that you’re there, prompting them to engage with your page when they see the notification pop up.

7. Run ads

Social media PPC ads are now one of the most popular and cost-effective ways to reach a large, targeted audience. Even if you’re a complete novice, you can get a lesson directly from FB themselves to get you started. You can also easily control budgets to ensure that you’re spending as much, or as little, as you like.

8. Get Creative

The beauty of social media is that it’s always on, which means that your prospects and customers are too. That gives you plenty of opportunities to promote your overall brand and ethos in lots of different ways. A great way to show off your company culture is to share candid day-to-day tasks, images and video clips of your team to engage with audiences on a personal level and thus encourage interaction.

9. Get competitive

If you haven’t already guessed it, encouraging engagement is one of the main objectives of social media promotion. A good way of enticing more followers to your page and thus raising the profile of your business is to host competitions and giveaways. This is simple, easy to manage and helps to increase brand awareness, whilst also generating interaction with followers.

10. Be valuable

No matter how invested you are able to be with your social media business pages, the most important thing to remember is that your content should always provide value to your audience. Whether that’s providing useful insights, sharing relevant news items or blogs, creating powerful imagery or telling important stories, if you’re generating valuable content then your business will ultimately benefit as a result.

For most businesses, social media is an essential part of your marketing strategy and should be treated as such. To keep this as effective as possible it’s important to develop both organic and paid social media strategies to support the growth and success of your business, especially in a more digitally reliant world.

To chat in more detail about how best to boost your socials, get in touch!

Does Social Media impact SEO? It may not be the rasion d’etre of SEO, but there is little doubt that social media impacts A LOT on search engine optimisation.

Firstly, let’s state facts – Google does not allow signals from social media sites to directly affect a ranking, BUT social media does gives marketing professionals a variety of ways in which to publicise their business – and position it high up on those ever-desirable search engine results pages.

So, if you’re still undecided about whether you need to invest in your social media strategy, or simply just start using a few platforms, take a look at these six ways in which social media really does impact your brands SEO.

Share and share alike

Not always a good thing, depending on what your preferences are for sharing, but in terms of most things digital, sharing is the holy grail.

Sharing of social posts helps drive traffic to your website. So, by including links to useful content via your socials you can increase shares, likes, comments – and ultimately, visibility of your business. Being cosistent with your posting on social platforms also makes you look professional, trustworthy and like you really do give a proverbial about engaging with your customers.

By engaging with prospective clients via social media, you are not only keeping your company at the forefront of their minds, but you are also driving social traffic back to your website – thus increasing your organic search engine ranking (see what I did there). Growing website traffic organically lends greater authenticity and authority to your website in the all-seeing eye of the search engine over-lords, proving to be a cost-effective way of boosting your SEO rankings.

Profiles get ranked

It’s not quite the swipe-right phenomenon of fast-date food chain, but social media profiles do get rank ed in search engine listings. This means that when someone types the name of your business into Google (*other search engines are available) any affiliated social media accounts will likely pop up alongside the official website too.

Therefore, if you’re feeling particularly savvy then not only are you able to rank your website, but also your social media profiles as well, this can help to beat out potential competitors in terms of visibility on the SEO top-spots and give you uncrushable power in the SEO stakes mwhahahaha (I jest, the interest is far too volatile for anything to be uncrushable, unfortunately).

Top tip: This will ONLY be effective if you are active and consistent across your social media platforms – make sure that you are using the right platforms to engage with your target audience, and work hard to keep them engaged. If you get all of this right, you should be sitting pretty, SEO wise, in no time.

The link collector

It is a truth universally acknowledged that external links are the key booster in determining the authority, and therefore ensuring the higher rankings, of your website in the eyes of Google.

Well, then isn’t it pretty darn cool that you can use your social media platforms to share valuable links like blogs and case studies in posts? This then increases the probability of other websites seeing and recognising you as someone who knows what you’re talking about, and thus uses your link as a reference.

Top tip: Make sure the quality of the content is high. People will only share things that they want to read themselves – so please don’t share drivel, the market is far too saturated.

Social Media is a stage…

…and you’re a STAR baby. Social media boosts your brand awareness. Facebook alone has over 1.71 billion monthly active users and Twitter has over 400 million monthly active users.* These figures demonstrate exactly how big a platform social media has become in providing a space for generating brand visibility.

Top tip: Social media management takes time and dedication, you need to be consistently engaging with your audiences on each platform by asking questions, joining in discussions and commenting on the latest trends and news – it also helps if you’re kinda funny (sorry).

Location, location, location…

Recent reports from Google indicate that 80% of smartphone users perform mobile searches to locate businesses that are close to them. This means that if Google has noticed this trend, then search engines are definitely paying attention to how users are searching for their content.

Most social media platforms make it easy for brands to leverage locality, allowing businesses to show geographic placement alongside a space for customers to discuss and review a business. The more people who ‘check-in’ or review your business online, the more likely it is that search engines will take note and bump you up the rankings.

Top tip: You must must must make sure that all address and contact information is consistent across all of your social media platforms and website (or else you just look a mess, quite frankly).

Favouritism is a thing…

Much like every parent would never dream of saying they have a favourite child – despite all evidence to the contrary – different search engines are unofficially partial to specific social media activity.

No one is trying to get sued here, but if you want to know who favours whom, you can, ironically, just Google it. However, it is important to remember that a certain search engine that starts with G and rhymes with boogle is not the only piggy who went to the market. So, take into account other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo who also take up large portion of the search engine share – and then plan your activity around it.

Top tip: Be sure to account for other search engines besides Google when creating SEO strategies, cast the net as wide as possible to make sure you’re covering all bases.

…

While social media may not be the direct route to SEO heaven, there certainly is a strong correlation between the two, and social media activity definitely influences online marketing success. Not only this, but as the number of social media users continues to rise, it’s likely that this correlation will only get stronger, making your socials more powerful in terms of SEO rankings.

So remember, always produce content worth sharing and take advantage of the platforms available to you and your business, you might be amazed at the results it can bring. And if you need some help? We’re always here to chat to you about developing your brand online, don’t be shy…

*figures supplied by Statista

Tag Archive for: social media

Does Social Media impact SEO? It may not be the rasion d’etre of SEO, but there is little doubt that social media impacts A LOT on search engine optimisation.