There is no way that you can do business without making use of social media nowadays. There are so many things that you can be doing on social media and you should be doing them for that matter. This is at all if you want to be successful in business in a 2015 and of course as 2016 comes up new things will come with it. The thing about social media nowadays is that the signals that come from it relating to your business are also considered when ranking the business on the search engines like Google. You do not need to be told how important it is for people to be able to find you on Google.

‘Social signals’ is one of those phrases that have been misused, abused and overused by search markets. It is surprising that some of the people who use this phrase do not even know the magnitude of effect these signals can have on a websites organic search rankings. Using social media marketing in your SEO campaign is very important. However you need to get a clear understanding of how the social media events will affect your website’s actual domain authority. It is a really complicated affair and what makes its worse it the fact that it is poorly understood. When you harness things like activities and engagements on social media then you can have a positive effect on the overall ranking of your site.

Social signal features that affect ranking

Perhaps it would be wise to point out that there is no one method that will ever get your website to the top. This is because Google has never shared out information concerning its algorithm with SEO professionals or the world in general. Otherwise if they had all websites would be on page one of Google but that would not be ideal, now would it? The thing that an SEO company will do is use data to develop correlational reports. It is not possible to prove that one factor (even these that are stated below) has a direct influence on the search rankings or domain authority. What are the social signals that are highly correlated with high-ranking pages?

1.       Social shares

Seattle-based SEO companyMoz carried out a study recently and discovered that the quantity/quality of tweeted links, Google +1s Facebook shares and so forth ranked at position nine as the most correlative factor for high search rankings. You probably know this already but the larger the number of people who are share your content is the more attention you will get from the search engines. This sharing could be either by clicking on the share buttons or posting a link to your content on the social media platforms.

2.       Influence- number of followers

One of the rules of social media for business is that you should connect with the influencers in your industry. For instance, if you are using Twitter, you should follow the movers and shakers in your industry. A quick search of any of these ‘movers and shakers’ on Google and you will probably find their Twitter account among the search results. It is worth pointing out that the number of followers you have on Twitter or page likes on Facebook will not have direct influence on the ranking of your website. Nonetheless, the fact that you have a large number of followers means that you will generate a larger number of shares, likes and comments for the content you post. This in turn brings in more inbound links to that content and of course the attention of the search engines is turned to your site.

3.       Quality trumps quantity

Another thing that is noteworthy about your social media account is the fact that quantity will never beat quality. It is possible to have 100 followers who are engaging with you frequently and sharing your material a lot and you will perform better than someone who has 10,000 followers. Are these many followers that you have accumulated over time interacting with your brand? The quality of followers you have will have an impact on your search ranking.

You can think of it in the sense of the groups on Whatsapp. When you are in a group of 100 people but only five of you are active in the group then you are probably going to get annoyed by the rest of the 95 and ignore them. This is probably the feeling that the search engines would get if they had emotions. A search engine will crawl your social media page like any other page and come across followers who are not adding any value to your account. It will similarly ignore the fact that you have very many people who are doing nothing for you.

4.       Profile activity

This is almost tied to the number of followers and quality points aforementioned. Nevertheless it is important to point out that your profile should also be active. There are people who post once a month and expect that they will get great returns from social media. It is possible to have those very many followers but a dormant or even extinct account.

Other benefits you stand to gain

There are so many other things that you stand to benefit when you have a great social media campaign running. For starters, you will get more people subscribing to your content. The traffic will increase to your site and if the content available there is awesome, you will get more subscriptions. You will also increase your following that increasing the reach of your content. As you continue posting content, you should not worry about how many likes you get for it because with time the number increases as will your conversions.

Bottom line

Having a thriving social media campaign is of great importance because you stand to gain a lot from it. You could increase the amount of traffic to your site and also boost your conversions significantly. However, there are things you should be striving to get. High quality content attracts high quality followers. You should also seek to achieve a large number of shares and this is also only possible by creating very good content that people will not mind sharing over and over again.

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