Defining Your Social Media Presence: A Quick Blogging SEO Guide

To stand out as a leader in your company’s niche, you need to have a social media presence. You need to show your expertise, know when to post for maximum engagement, and more. The problem is that your follower base is small, not growing steadily, and a comment on a post is cause for celebration. Here are some tips to help your company stand out on social media.

Forming a Base with a Blog

When you think “social media,” the first things to come to mind are likely Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and more. But what do you actually post to these platforms? If your company does not have a blog, there’s nothing to link back to. While whoever is managing the platforms might be engaging followers, there’s no draw to your website. A blog is the main pillar holding up your social media posts. The first, and one of the most important, steps to this process is creating or improving a blog, and maintaining a consistent posting schedule.

Related: 5 Motivational Techniques for Business Success

To be a leader in your niche, you need to show your expertise by writing articles. However, don’t only focus on niche topics. Having general information about your niche, making it more accessible, invites more readers. For example, discuss recent news in your industry, and give your company’s expert opinion and analysis to prove you are the right company for potential clients.

Let’s look at the car niche. Unitronic provides performance hardware and software for cars, so they provided a blog post on how parts have gone from analog to digital. A tire vendor offers a beginner’s guide to off-roading. Both offer information to the reader, and a link to products, in these cases car parts and off-road tires.

Consistent Posting

 If the last blog post is two months old, and there isn’t any immediate plan to write another post, your company may as well not have a blog. Not posting and engaging means missing an opportunity to reach prospective clients or customers. You have fewer people to educate on your niche or show your expertise to.

Why bother with social media? Volume. According to the Pew Research Center, about 69 percent of the American public uses social media, and 68 percent of adults use Facebook. For younger demographics, 88 percent of Americans ages 18-29 use Facebook, while 59 percent uses Instagram. Posting that link or photo of your team doing something amusing has the potential to reach millions with little effort, all while exposing your brand and blog.

The 80/20 Principle

 Material wealth. Peas in pea pods. Products that make a company’s profit. How much of Italy was owned by a part of the population at the turn of the 20th century. These four things all have a ratio of 80/20. Economist Vilfredo Pareto stumbled on an interesting ratio in 1800s when trying to determine how much of Italy was owned by a part of the population. About 20 percent of Italians owned 80 percent of the land. Being an economist, he also determined 20 percent of the population had 80 percent of the country’s material wealth. Thus, the 80/20 principle, or Pareto’s Principle, was created. Today, it is most often used in a business setting, such as 80 percent of a company’s profits are made from sales of only 20 percent of products.

For our purposes, it’s the proportion of promotional articles. About 80 percent of your content should not be pushing your latest product or service, instead simply engaging your audience, inviting comments and shares. For example, Red Bull’s audience wants to see extreme sports. The company doesn’t need to splash their logo across the screen; their reputation is extreme sports. Take a look at one of their Instagram videos: Motocross stunts in an airplane graveyard with neither a can of Red Bull or the logo in the video, and it has more than 656,000 views. SEO giant Moz refers to this as the “BuzzFeed Approach.” That leaves the other 20 percent of posts, which can be promotional content that showcases services, products, or sales. Overall, providing information that will benefit the consumer is the goal.

Post at the Right Time

 Finally, if you really want to drive engagement on a specific post — and in turn up the SEO value of pages linked in that post — there are guidelines for timing when to publish the post. Facebook users, for example, respond most to posts made on Thursdays around 1 p.m., local time. Instagram users, meanwhile, engage more with posts published Mondays at 2 a.m., 8 a.m., and 5 p.m. Targeting the professional community on LinkedIn? Times your posts at noon or 5 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday,  when most workers are on lunch or just getting off work.

With the right types of blog posts, posting consistently, and timing your posts for each social media platform, you can greatly improve not only your customer experience, but also conversions and engagement.