Establishing a following on social media platforms goes hand in hand with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) mainly because of the popularity of social media in today’s modern era. Both SEO and social media platforms make use of inbound strategies for attracting visitors and making it easy for consumers to find you via certain keywords. In this article, we take a look at some of the top social media platforms that you can use to enhance your brand’s SEO performance.
Why Use Social Media Platforms For SEO?
Before we proceed forward to look at the best social media platforms, let us first understand the importance of social media platforms for SEO. Here are a few reasons why being active on social media platforms can improve the SEO performance of your business:
Backlinks:
When you publish a link on social media platforms, external links that are inbound to your website are created that redirect to your website. Making use of these backlinks on various reliable social media platforms can improve the page ranking of your website in search engines
Social media profiles and search engines:
When you use a search engine to look for a business or brand online, you will be able to find the social media pages among the top results. Social channels are more personal than websites and most consumers will prefer visiting your social media profile before they visit your website to get a better sense of the brand’s personality.
Increased traffic:
It is a simple rule of thumb – the more people who find you on social media, the more they will end up visiting your website. If the people like your brand personality and the links that you share on social media, they will visit your website more often. This will eventually generate increased traffic for your website, which is the fundamental requirement for improved search engine rankings.
Increased influence:
The influence that you have on social media defines your brand authority. The more likes, shares, and followers that you have on social media, the more people will click through to your website.
Social media platforms are search engines as well:
We categorize Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the likes as being search engines but we never keep in mind that social media platforms are also heavily dependent on their own search functions. The process of SEO for search engines includes the search that is carried out on social media platforms, which means that you need to focus on optimizing your rankings on social media, as well.
Top 10 Social Media Platforms For Improved SEO:
Below is a list of the most popular social media platforms that support SEO.
Since Google+ had 300 million users in October 2013, it may not be the biggest social media platform but the important fact is that Google owns it. Google keeps a record and notices your activity on Google+, so the more active you are on this platform, the better rankings you will have in the most popular search engine.
YouTube is one amazing platform for everyone, who has videos to show. For those who don’t have any videos, it is advised to start thinking about creating them because it’s one of the most effective ways of attracting people to your brand. YouTube is also owned by Google and is used by more than 1 billion users, with over 4 billion videos watched every day; making it the world’s second-largest search engine. 22% of the entire social media traffic from the US is on YouTube, making it one of the most popular platforms in the country. Therefore, even if there isn’t a lot of traffic on your website, your presence on YouTube can grow your brand awareness, increase your social presence and convert into sales.
Facebook is a very well-developed and one of the biggest social networking sites currently. According to the statistics, more than 1.71 billion people from around the world monthly used Facebook in the second quarter of the year 2016. A lot of people look for a brand’s Facebook page before visiting its website. Therefore, Facebook is one of the best places for you in order to earn good business leads.
Twitter is another great social media platform. With over 313 million daily users in the second quarter of 2016, Twitter has become a large social search engine that is widely used for daily news as well. Usually, links posted on Twitter lead back to your site. In order to build an audience and get more visitors to your website, you should tweet on a regular basis, use the correct hashtags, discuss hot topics, and create catchy headlines for readers.
70% of people on this site use it to gain help while making purchase decisions. There are over 1 million brand pages on the platform, and it had 100 million users by September 2015. Experts believe Pinterest is a great visual place, where you can get yourself found, shared, and your products sold. People find your pins by searching, which leads them to your own website, hence increasing the traffic there.
Another excellent visual website is Instagram. It is one of the best places to present content or products that rely on visual impacts, such as fashion brands. With 65% of the top brands having accounts on Instagram, it had 400 million monthly active users in September 2015.
LinkedIn is a more professional platform and is one of the best social media websites when it comes to connecting with businesses, especially for B2B organizations. With more than 380 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is used by 53% of business-to-business companies to search for clients because people who engage with them on Linkedin have 50% more chances to make a purchase.
It is an online image and video-based platform that was created in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. It is commonly used by people who embed and share pictures. Approximately one million photographs are shared on Flickr every day by more than 112 million users.
This social media platform was co-founded by former employees at Facebook – Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheevar. Quora is primarily a question-answer website that is used by more than 80 million people around the world. Due to a large audience, it has managed to make more than $141M in venture capital funds.
Even though a lot of people find Tumblr to be the least user-friendly social platform, they also agree that it is one of the most interesting networking sites. There is a wide range of types of content you can share on this website, as it supports video and photo posts, chat posts, audio posts, and quote posts. Tumblr allows reblogging just like Twitter allows retweeting, and it is simple and quick. Created in 2007, Tumblr now has over 200 million blogs.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of every digital marketing and most marketers recognize that social media is one of the most influential platforms for optimizing a website’s search engine performance. However, a common question asked here is:
“Which social media platforms to make use of?”
In this article, we take a look at the 10 best social media channels that you can use for increasing SEO, by reaching out to broader audiences and generating more traffic on your website.
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