Generating more traffic to the company’s site always remains on the agenda for business owners. Social media platforms have exploded onto the scene as potentially high impact business tools in the past decade and are ruling the Internet. Coincidentally, the number of fans, followers, or “likes” a company’s social site has does not directly translate into higher page rankings or even increase website traffic. However, it is an essential part to the process.
What can you do about it?
Working Hand-in-Hand
Properly executed SEO campaigns, coupled with social media efforts, are great ways to not just build up page ranks, but also gain exposure. SEO is extremely content driven. Where social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter shine in the “sharing” department, SEO helps maximize and bank on content creation.
The idea is fairly simple: address current, popular topics and create great content to match (Source). Attracting readers and having them link back to your content will help increase that traffic you’re after. The more links, the better.
How does social media come into play here?
Monitoring these mediums helps companies decipher what their client’s needs are and how they want them fulfilled. The content can then be matched more closely to what the clients will read (or are currently reading, rather) and share (Source). In an industry where what matters, is generating interest, you need to pay attention to this stuff (Source).
And on to the next point.
Social ROI: Get it, and then Some
One of the bigger challenges for marketing firms and departments has been trying to best quantify social media progress (Source). After syncing up your social media and SEO zen, it’s time to find out what it’s worth, granted, these campaigns can take some time to yield real results. Calculate the percentage of increased sales and leads attributed to social media and divide that by your social investment (Source).
Let’s take Zappos.com for example, one of the biggest online retailers to date. They have incorporated a personalized way to connect with consumers, with what they call a “Like-Like Relationship” (Source). Liking and subscribing to them provides these “likers” with exclusive content that they, otherwise, wouldn’t have access to.
For instance, you could run promotions that are only found through your social media page (with/without a “like”) and keep track of those promotions or those categories. (These purchases would still have to be made through the official company site.) In this case, your social ROI can be quantified and more traffic will be funneled to your main site.
Seeing a change in that department will help you better identify if your social media campaign is proving successful or ineffective. From here, you can decide if your content is generating the response you wanted or repelling potential clients.
Are you on that track? Keep it coming. Keep it interesting.