We all know that social media is important to your marketing strategy. As social media continues to grow and more time is spent maintaining sites, it is important to understand that social media is more than just a branding tool.
Social Media Signals
There is no doubt that social media presence impacts organic search results. This can specifically be seen in social media signals. Social media signals, such as tweets, comments, likes, and +’s, tell search engines that the content being shared is valuable. The key to generating social signals is to create good content and engage actively. Web site traffic and rankings are increased when users are directed to the site through the use of multiple links from various social media signals. Another simple way to improve social signals is to make it easy to share content. This can be accomplished by adding social sharing buttons directly on a web site.
Personalized Search
Personalized search is another example of how social media is affecting SEO. Search results vary from each user depending on location and the social media platform being used. Google’s launch of Search, plus Your World, personalizes search results with friend recommendations, photos, and posts. Bing is another search engine that has incorporated personalized searches. When signed into a Facebook account, the user will see relevant results that their friends have “liked.”
Personalized searches can have a huge impact on click-through rates. People tend to trust recommendations from people in their social circles as opposed to search engine recommendations. With more than 800 million active users on Facebook and 100 million users on Google Plus, the ability to share content on social platforms can have a huge impact on traffic to a web site.
