Content Marketing and Social Media

Content marketing and social media are the best way to market your brand or product on Internet. Not an easy task, if you ask marketing specialists, but very rewarding, if it’s done properly.

Do you write great content and have difficulty propelling it on top of the search results? Do you think your articles are better than other pages listed on Google’s first page? Or maybe you write content in a unique way that would appeal to a certain people segment, but your pages never had the chance to be read. You are not alone, there are many writers, and content marketers with great websites that just don’t have enough readers. There are a few things you can do to push your content on first pages of the search engines, where they belong. One of these things is using social media as a traffic source, and also use the new trends in the search engines world, social signals, as a quality signal.

What Are the Social Signals and Why Search Engines Care about them?

Social signals are metrics that tell search engines when a subject is hot. In other words, if a particular content piece gets reshared, and gets liked a lot on multiple social media platforms, search engines will interpret that as a positive signal.

A new concept, introduced by Google with its Google+ as a social engine, is to match social groups to provide them with similar search results, in order to deliver the most relevant results.

Why Are Likes Important and which Social Media Platform is Better?

For instance the number of likes on a page means to a search engine that people like that page, and they consider the likes as votes. The number of votes on a page is a sign of quality and it is rewarded by search engines by moving it up in the search results. Any kind of social media “votes” on a page, can move that page up in search engine rankings. But for this specific signal to validate, it needs other social signals as well. Social signals are Facebook likes, the Google+ shares, and plus ones, reshares on Twitter, Stumbleupon votes, etc…

Interestingly, Google has stated that social signals have to validate in time as well, in order to be taken in consideration. Some SEO specialists think that social signals will start to validate in the third year of social networking activity. If the social signals drop after the first year, all the signals are lost. For a search engine this means that either the subject lost public interest, or the social signals were unnatural.

To sum up this, all social media signals are important, and all platform votes say something about your content to the search engines.

Relevance Is the Key

Let’s take the example of an article that talks about computers. All my Facebook friends know that I am an IT Systems Engineer and if I share a link to a post, I vouch for the reliability of the source. They are more likely to share that with their friends, than repost a link, posted by me, about cars. They know I don’t know anything about cars. The same goes with Google+ and Twitter.

Stick with subject that you are familiar with, you can have an objective opinion on, and your friends will identify you with.
If I post a link to an article about wedding dresses, all my friends will first think that I must have been drunk when I did it, or someone blackmailed me. On the other hand, if my daughter shares the link it is natural. Of course Google has a way to figure that out, or if it doesn’t have it yet, it will have it soon. Remember the Penguin update? Don’t spam your friends!

Think of this as a recommendation in your social network. When someone asks me to recommend them a new laptop to buy, they know they will get the best information, because It’s my job and I know what I am talking about. But if I approach my friends and start talking about the gorgeous wedding dress I just saw in a friend’s store, I would just look weird.

Content Marketing and Social Media

Content marketing is a term relatively new to coin the act of creating content to improve sells. There are many writers on Internet that can be placed under the same umbrella, and not only businesses that sell products. The Internet marketers, the writers on social writing platforms, such as Hubpages and Squidoo, many bloggers, etc… use content to attract readers. If the content is interesting it will be rewarded with traffic, hence bring money to the writer, most often from ads.

Content marketing is probably the best type of marketing on the Internet, and in theory it is very easy to target your market using it. In practice, there is a lot of competition, and even if you have the best content on web, your articles might not be getting any traffic. If your content is great, social media will reward you with visitors, but you have to be active on social media. Some social media campaigns have gone viral, and they surpassed even the most optimistic predictions. Social media has the advantage that it doesn’t follow any algorithms to rank content, the numbers of shares and likes is the ultimate ranking algorithm. If people like your post, they’ll share it with others, if not they won’t share it, this means that only content that appeal to public will be rewarded. For this reason, social media is a great signal for search engines, if it gets shared and liked, it is because people like it.

What Can I Do to Improve My Social Signals

Make it easy for people to like your content by adding all the social media share buttons pertinent to your website. At a minimum, you should have Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. People will not make the effort to copy paste your URL into a new window, just to share it. If you make it easy for them, they will like and share your page.

Be Part of the Community, and Build a Community

Social network platforms don’t mean anything if you don’t socialize. These platforms are not your just so that spam them, people will just kick you out of their community immediately. Be part of the community, and interact with it, and not just post there.

While you are there take your time to acknowledge other’s posts and work, they will return the favor. If you post every time but never take the time to like other’s people content, they’ll end up by ignoring you, and that’s not good for you.

Reward great content regardless of relationship with the author, that makes you look good, as a finder of that post or infographic, and get your profile more authority.

Content Marketing Power Tip: The more people in your niche vote for your content, the more relevant your content is in the eyes of search engines. Google+ is the most powerful social network engine for building relevancy. Google+ can determine if a person is an authority on a subject matter or niche. If your video or article gets many reshares and “plus ones” from authorities in the subject matter, the video, or article, will get ranked. Make sure you setup authorship and publisher tags on your website.
This, combined with other quality signals will make up the ranking for that specific term. Other page quality signals are: average time spent on a page, bounce backs, click outs, etc…

Don’t look at social media for content marketing as to a competition, if you have more likes and pluses, you will outrank other webmasters. Think of it as a team work, to improve everyone’s rankings. If you look at the big players on the social media, and bloggers, you will see that there are repeated interactions from bloggers in the same niche. These guys know that working together will help everybody’s content in rankings.

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