Every small business owner has a Facebook page. Now what?
Some few of them are very adept at sharing and posting and putting up their specials – but most of them are not.
But before we go too far into what you should be doing, let’s double down on one point. Your Google+ page may be even more important for SEO and driving traffic than your Facebook page. So do everything below with BOTH your Facebook page and your Google+ page too (even if you’re barely maintaining that Google+ page).
If you’re primarily a B2B business, you may want to do the same on LinkedIn. And if you’re sure that your customer base is actively using some other social media, then by all means, do all of the following there too.
This article is primarily focusing on what small businesses can and should do to get more traffic from the activities they take part in on social media. There are other benefits too, but for now we’re mostly focused on driving organic traffic from Social Media posts. Some of that traffic will naturally go to your social media profiles, rather than directly to your website. That’s the nature of the beast, so be sure that people can easily navigate from your social media profile pages directly to your site.
1. Always Work to Get More Fans and Followers
That sounds simple enough. Be cool on social media. Be popular and if you’re a curmudgeon at least be a popular one, or hire someone with a glowing attitude. It can seem slow, but even for a small business with a loyal following, purely organic followers who just happen to like what you do are better than any number of followers that you can buy. Google will detect the difference. Useful, interesting and helpful postings and articles and photos are always going to find an audience. That’s just one way to get started.
2. Build a Brand
Nothing builds brand like a strong personality. So even curmudgeons can do it. You’d be surprised, though, how many small business owners still think brand means “logo.” Stop that thinking right now. Brand means personality – but for a business (which theoretically has no person). Reputations are had on and through social media and that reputation depends strongly on your having a personality able to carry that reputation through and to get it growing. Branded searches – people searching for you by name – are a wonderful affirmation that it’s working. But the result is also that search engines are then willing to deliver your brand name to more searchers in more situations. That’s their job and they know it. The search engines are not interested in delivering traffic to unreliable, untested and un-reputable sites or profiles.
3. Think Like a Broadcaster to Get More Links
That can’t be over-emphasized. It often means creating useful content on your site and then sharing it via social media, but it has to hook peoples’ attentions for them to share it and sometimes, when you get lucky, for them to link to you. Nobody in any kind of social media position should ever tell you that that is an easy process. But for good writers and astute social media users it’s worth the effort – and the effects will just continue to grow.
4. Optimize All of Your Posts
That is with Keywords so that search engines know what you’re talking about. Titles need to be descriptive and accurate, and they can (and should) change, even just slightly between the media where you’re posting. So your site contains a new article. Now you need to post the link with a slightly different article description and a new title on each of your social media channels. Google+ posts of this variety are some of the most lucrative posts you’ll make, and they frequently will appear in search results where your website (and the actual article being linked) are on page 87. That’s a huge difference, but it can and should be optimized for semantic search, (that is, your title might be phrased as a question – or as the answer to the question being answered).
5. Sharing is the New Ranking Influencer
When your followers start actually sharing your content then they are validating your expertise and authority to the search engines. All of them are watching and getting your followers to share should be one of your primary goals. Still, it’s not terrifically simple. At times, no more than once every few weeks, you could ask followers to share with an incentive, perhaps a prize for sharing. Asking for likes if people are in agreement is a similar process of incentivizing likes. But the main point is not so much to get more eyeballs but to show the search engines how well you are engaged with your public. That builds authority.
6. Go Local
Everything you do in your local community is fair game. But see number four above. If you’re doing local events, then explain why and what you’re doing in an article on your site. Then broadcast it above. Make sure everyone else at the event is getting the same attention from you and be sure all the photos are getting locally optimized titles and descriptions – before they get shared. Spread lots of love to the local non-competitive community and work with any other big personalities to make sure they see your supporting content, too.
Nobody loves Orange County business like we do. Getting it social and involved is just part the first part of the fun. There’s no turn-key solution to strong consistent SEO results today, but we’ll be happy to look at your project and get it back on the rails today.
>This article was written by james t. James is a New Jersey native but currently lives in Mexico City because it’s a tad bit cold in New Jersey at the moment. Still, he is looking forward to the 2014 Super Bowl being held in his freezing home state.