Social media marketing— a crucial ingredient in digital exposure and engagement. On the other hand, Google focuses more on high-quality and shareable content. The importance of social media marketing in link building strategies is becoming more prominent for organizations of all sizes.
Link Building: A Quick Recap
Link building is the process in which you encourage other brands to display a link to your website on their own. Thus, you want other sites to link back to your site.
Think of this every link that you get as a vote showing the value and credibility of your website. The website with the most high-quality votes stands the best chance of ranking highly because of its keyword.
According to Google’s algorithm, gaining high-quality backlinks and a healthy link profile is the majority of a website ranking.
The Role of Social Media Platforms In Link Building
More often than not, social media is thought of as a useless factor for link building. This is because links from social media sites are usually unfollowed.
Yet, it’s not the intended purpose. The main reason for link building via social media is to get links outside the social networks through the people inside them.
Confused? Remember those networking events you’ve been to— where you met all those people with business cards?
Those individuals who boldly walk to give you a handshake with that fancy business card. Then, starts storytelling about how wonderful their organization is. You’d smile and nod, but you know it can be annoying.
Mainly because you do not even know that person and they started to boast about themselves and their “wonderful” organization without even taking the time to get to know you either.
Well, it’s the same online. You just can’t expect to receive a link from someone you don’t even know and hit them up with: “Hey there, can you backlink to my site?”
Like duh, who the hell are you?
Link building is all about relationships. It is by establishing and refining these relationships so you can build up links back to your website.
Top social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more, is the perfect tool through which you can get and build such relationships. It is where you can showcase your organization and get involved in conversations by providing real value.
Although social media has no direct impact on your search rankings, it can be useful for driving traffic in other ways.
With social media, you can help improve your link building. Specifically speaking, it can help in the following areas:
- Content promotion
- Content ideation
- Link prospecting
- Outreach
Link Building In Social Media
So, now that you’re convinced of the importance of social media marketing in link building, we’ll look at tried-and-tested ways to gain those precious links.
1. Build Relationships
As mentioned above, social media is all about building relationships, which is no different when trying to build links. The goal is to influence webmasters/editors to click publish on your link. This will never happen unless you start right and establish a relationship.
However, building relationships in social media is not as easy as it sounds. It needs to be personal, natural and engaging in an honest manner. Only this way you can earn high-quality links since they will come from people that trust your brand.
You need to take part in conversations about your products, share content, answer questions, mention, and comment on what your audience shares.
It is not always necessary to show off your expertise. Sometimes, one simple comment like “Wow. Great post!” is enough. It already helps build personalized engagement and connection. And please do not try to automate your interactions. Although it can save time, users want a personalized response in order to bring results.
This helps build your presence on the social platform. Then, people will start recognizing your brand and will feel more like it to share your content or check out your services and products.
2. Search For Niche Bloggers
You probably know this: Guest blogging is a widespread method of building links.
It usually goes like this: You Google people or websites that you think might be interested in your topic. Then, you contact them and get permission to write and publish a post on their sites.
Guest posting has various benefits including:
- Building relationships
- Introducing yourself to a new audience
- Making you look good in the eye of search engines
In fact, an article stated that SEO guest posting can be 5x more valuable than creating new content on your own website, given you get the backlink.
Unfortunately, guest posting is not a simple and quick process. It usually takes months. Even with patience, there’s only about a 5 percent chance of your blog post being accepted according to the outreach experts at backlink masters.
The good news is that social media can simplify your connection strategy. Not only that, but it also improves your chances for a positive outcome.
For this, you’ll need social media monitoring tools. You need to enter your industry or niche keywords and find authors who mentioned these keywords.
You now have a list of key influential voices that you can reach out to. At this point, it’s all about interaction and building relationships.
Connect with these bloggers and spend time engaging with their content. This way, when you will finally approach them for a favor to get mentioned in their posts, you will have a much better chance of receiving a positive reply.
3. Post Valuable, High-Quality Content
Fact: Social media is a distribution channel. It creates more buzz than the rest of the distribution platforms, thanks to its popularity. Thus, it is a great place to increase your brand exposure and attract more customers.
Unfortunately, just being on social media platforms is not enough. You need to work harder for better exposure on social media.
The primary thing you can do is create content. But not just any contents. You need valuable, high-quality, and controversial content with the flair to go viral.
It needs to be able to start a debate, to garner valuable attention from several points of view. However, it does not mean that you present some ridiculous argument or counter-narratives which go against your brand voice.
No. What you need is a post to generate buzz and get more attention to your business. Meaning, more traffic.
In addition, if you are an expert in whatever you are offering or selling, then the least you can do is to create “how-to” content. People are consistently looking for “how-to” advice. And you can cater to this demand by providing valuable and instructional posts. With this type of content, you present your knowledge on social media, ultimately earning you enough exposure and links.
Closing Thoughts
Google does not give much priority to incoming links from social media. However, social media platforms offer several opportunities for link building. Thanks to its popularity and the influx of incoming traffic from these channels.
Although you might focus on things such as lead generation or customer support for your social media marketing, don’t overlook its capability for building links. The connection is not obvious but it doesn’t mean that a definite SEO value is not there.
We hope that you’re now convinced of the importance of social media marketing in link building. Know any other ways of social media link building? Feel free to share it with us or visit web site and fire up the comment section below!