Getting backlinks from social media platforms is critical for your SEO and inbound digital marketing strategy. Quality links to your site indirectly help in your search engine ranking while also giving you targeted traffic for your website. With over 60 popular and niche social networking platforms there is plenty of opportunity to get right visitors to your site. According to Econsultancy’s State of Search Marketing Report 82% of digital marketing agencies integrate social media in their SEO strategy.
Are You Getting Enough Backlinks from Social Media?
You can check traffic from social media platforms by using Google Analytics. Use Campaign URL builder to tag your links and measure them in Google Analytics.
If you are not getting good amount of leads from social media consider using following methods to get quality links.
Use Personal Profiles Too
All social networking platforms have an option to create a personal profile or a company profile. Personal profiles with pictures and names of real persons generate more engagement than brand profiles. This is because people want to connect with real people on social media sites. While brand pages are good for announcements and advertisements, real conversations happen with actual people.
This doesn’t mean you have to discontinue your brand profile/page. What’s important to note is that both brand and personal profile have their own advantages. For example, LinkedIn does not allow company profiles to start a conversation with others. That means you can only respond to queries and your reach is limited. However, LinkedIn company profile allows targeted sponsored posts and many other helpful features.
It is ideal to have personal profiles along with business profile. Be sure to have genuine profiles as fake profiles will damage your reputation. You can use employee profiles to do this.
Build Links in Your Profile
The next step is to build maximum links in your social media profile that point to your website. Without these links all the social following and engagement would be wasted. You can move people further in your marketing funnel by inserting links to lead pages in:
1) Profile Descriptions
2) About us section
3) Pinned posts in Facebook and LinkedIn
4) Video descriptions in Youtube
5) Instagram Stories
6) Photos and photo descriptions(Instagram only allows this for paid ads)
7) Social Media Posts
Add Value to Communities
Only conversations that are in context gain engagement on social media. Promoting your own services or page is not meaningful to anyone. Instead respond to what people and communities are talking about and add value to the conversation with your knowledge. This could be your take on the point raised or a link to related and informative blog. It could even be something entertaining like a funny meme.
People will naturally get curious about you once you start sharing knowledge on a regular basis. This is when they will click to check out your profile and what you do. Promoting your services before building trust and authority is poor strategy to get links from social media. So do not sneak a link to your blog in comments section just yet.
Meaningful Interactions
It’s easy to lose depth of communication in likes and comments. You have many friends on your Facebook, however it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them will value you equally. To have meaningful interaction is to build relations by helping others reach their goals too. Since you only have so much time to devote to each person you follow, you must choose a few influencers or users that you plan to build long term relation with (more on this in the next point).
Try to reach important users through other channels like email or phone to build stronger relation. Help them reach more followers through cross-promotion or turn their post into an infographic and offer to link it on their blog. Over the long term these relations will pay off by sending more links to your profile and site.
Follow Right People
It’s important to be seen as industry authority if you want good quality links to your site. Your relationship and engagement with the right users is essential here.
Obviously your time is limited and this is the reason you must strategically choose the right people to interact with. Use tools such as Klout, Buzzsumo, FollowerWonk to find right influencers in your industry and monitor social media.
These tools also look at followers list to find an overlap between your and other industry influencer’s followers. This makes getting new followers and links more likely. Cross promotions and comment interactions with these influencers will benefit both of you in the end.
Join Niche Networks
There are lots of niche social networking sites apart from the big players such as Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter etc. Find out where your target audience is and start posting there. These niche sites typically have higher user engagements because of a stronger community. You will definitely find more success here if you strike the right chord.
For example, Imgur is a great platform to target geeky millennial men. Reddit has an active discussion on different topics (also called subreddits). Quora is another platform to build your authority and drive traffic through your links in answers.
Another advantage of these sites is that they have a transparent voting system which determines which posts, answers and comments are shown first. This makes it very easy to monitor content and know your user engagement.
Post Linkable Content
Some content has more potential to drive traffic to your pages. Links to quiz, comparison blog posts, interview with industry celebrities etc., are compelling invitation to your site. Be creative with content and use fresh features such as live videos, stories, online polls to drive traffic.
Your posts on social media platforms must be a preview into something interesting that drives users to click on it.
These are some of the ways leading content marketers are using to drive traffic from social media platforms. Do you use any of these and what has been your success with them? Let us know in the comments below.
