Social Media Management – Net Effect of Social Media and SEO

As part of my quest to learn about social media management as well as search engine optimization (SEO), I would like to share some steps that you can take to improve your social media presence and, as a result, your social authority.

Social media management is about having a social media strategy for your brand and to maintain your presence regularly over time.

The Net Effect of Social Media and SEO

By now most people know that some social media factors have a significant impact on search. There include:

• The number of Twitter followers you have, the quality of your followers, and the relevance of your followers to your industry. The retweets you receive as opposed to how much you tweet is also important.
• The number of Facebook fans for your company’s page and the number of comments on the page.
• The number of views on YouTube videos, how many comments you have, and the ratio of how many times your videos have been liked.
• The number of social mentions you have overall on any social sites around the Web.

Here are 7 steps to a better social presence that you need to take right away:

1. Do solid keyword research. You already know that keyword research is important for SEO, but it’s equally important for participation in social media. Find terms that you know you can rank for and then use them in every social site you target, as well as in the content that you produce for them.

2. Ensure that your content is easy to link to. Every piece of content that you put on the Web should have a mechanism for Tweeting, Liking at Facebook, and adding to social bookmarking sites. If people don’t have a way to share your content, they probably won’t.

3. Check your page load time.  Waiting for a page that doesn’t load almost instantly, sends people right off the page.

4. Ensure that every public page of your website has a solid title with a keyword close to the beginning and a natural description, using your keyword as early as possible. A recommended SEO plugin would be the “All-in-One SEO” for WordPress blog or optimized themes like Thesis or Genesis so that a title and description can be entered for every post you make.

5. Use only link shorteners that provide permanent redirects for your links in social sites. Sites with added tracking, such as Bit.ly, are your best choice. This makes a huge difference to search spiders.

6. Improve your Facebook Page with a photo, use applications that are relevant to your business, and keep adding relevant content to your page on a regular basis.

7. Track and monitor everything you do for social impact. Join a site like Tynt.com or TwentyFeet.com, free sites that measure you your social reach and sends regular email reports. Use tracking links for every blog post, tweet and Facebook entry you write, and measure and improve everything you do over time.

What action you need to take next

If you are serious about building your brand’s presence on the internet, here are two activities you need to do next:

• Create a social media strategy if you don’t have one yet (click for a free template that will help you identify your objectives, tactics and what to measure)
• Optimize for local search – click to use the “21 Steps to dominate Google” program to optimize your website for local search