How social media influences your SEO strategy

Often social media and
SEO
are often regarded by companies as two separate areas of their own online marketing strategy. And even if they differ in many places, they should not be completely separated from each other.

We explain how social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter can positively influence your SEO strategy.

Your activity on social media platforms can definitely positively influence your SEO strategy. This is mainly because search engines like Google take such activities into account when they evaluate the ranking of websites and content.

Of course, a company’s social media presence is only a small indicator for search engines and only indirectly influences search engine optimization. However, the impact of these linkages should not be underestimated. If the social media strategy is well thought out, of high quality and implemented regularly, it can definitely influence SEO positively.

Although each platform has different goals and audiences, there is some overlap in the factors that influence SEO.

Social media SEO refers to the optimization of content on social media to improve visibility and ranking in search results. It’s a strategy to make sure your content on social media is optimized for search engines.

Social media SEO is about using relevant keywords and phrases in your social media profiles, posts and hashtags. By including these relevant keywords, search engines can better recognize your content and rank it higher in search results.

In addition, it is important to create quality content that will be shared by others on social media. By increasing activity, interactions, and links to your social media profiles and posts, you can increase your visibility in search results.

Social media SEO also includes optimizing meta tags, titles, and descriptions of your social media profiles to improve findability in search engines.

Links

First and foremost, your presence on social media should have an impact on your SEO through linking. These links go in two directions: One is the links from your social media channels to your website. On the other hand, linking to your website, in posts on Instagram, Facebook etc.. Especially through the latter, you strengthen your online presence and credibility – both for Google and the user. This way, Google knows through the links that you have a relevant offer for a target audience.

A third type of linking would be for other social media accounts to link to your respective account or even directly to your website. This can boost the reach and traffic of your business or brand immensely. In addition, Google grants you a higher authority through such links, which can have a positive effect on the ranking in the search results.

Interaction

On websites, interaction is usually rather scarce and usually relates to one user. On social media platforms, on the other hand, things look very different: Here, users regularly like, comment and share, thus increasing the reach of a brand immensely.

Through these interactions of your followers, you can easily reach people who don’t follow you yet. The more users that reach the website in this way, the higher the likelihood that the search engine ranking will be improved.

Social Signals

Social signals are signals that emanate from social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram and indicate the popularity and relevance of a brand. These social signals play a role in particular when a user finds out about different brands and compares them.

If a brand is very popular and active on Facebook, for example, this is evidence of authenticity for users. Users are more likely to trust these brands, i.e. those that have no social media accounts or only a few followers and publish irregular content.

Content distribution

On social media, it’s all about content that arouses curiosity. The type of content depends on the platform. Instagram is great for visual content, Facebook and LinkedIn for longer posts and news, Twitter is also great for short announcements.

So you can distribute your corresponding content on the respective platforms excellently. At the same time, the content should always be relevant and of high quality so that it has a positive impact on your relevance and credibility.

Each social media platform has different strengths. You can also use these strengths for your business and thus influence the SEO strategy of your company.

Instagram

The impact Instagram has on your website’s SEO is rather indirect. However, its impact can be great. In Germany alone Instagram has a user base of 29.85 million, which represents about 36% of the population. According to an ARD/ZDF online study the number of users is particularly high among the under-30s: 74% are on the social media platform. This offers great potential for expanding the online presence of one’s own brand or company.
Instagram stands out for your SEO strategy in two main ways:

Visual content: Through Instagram, you can let images and videos speak for you or your brand. High-quality images and videos combined with short, meaningful texts are therefore the key to creating a presence here. Instagram content, for example, is a great way to announce product news and redirect people to the website.

Credibility: Instagram can contribute significantly to your credibility. This is because the images and videos on the platform make the products more tangible for many customers. On the one hand, visually – so you show once again that your product really exists. On the other hand, through the comments and opinions of other users. Many potential customers use Instagram to learn about the brand and build trust.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn differs from other social media platforms in that it is a business platform. Users explicitly want to find out about companies and brands on the platform and exchange information with other professionals. There are two factors that influence your SEO strategy:

Authority: By having your company’s presence on LinkedIn, you can testify to your authority in your field of expertise, first and foremost. Here, brands and professionals communicate about content and, in the best case, share it. In doing so, LinkedIn is a great place to point out news in your company as well as blog posts that boost your authority. Especially for companies in the B2B sector, LinkedIn can be a useful platform.

Personal Branding: In personal branding, the focus is not on the branding of your company, but on that of your employees. However, if your employees appear as experts and are active on LinkedIn, this will naturally have a positive influence on your company.

Facebook

Facebook is still the most widely used social media platform: Around 35% of Germans use Facebook on a weekly basis. Reason enough to use the platform to strengthen your company’s credibility, relevance and authority. However, there is another important factor:

User feedback: Facebook offers users the opportunity to give or obtain ratings and feedback on companies. Little by little, the platform has thus established itself as a kind of rating platform, especially for companies. Especially in the buying phase, when the potential buyer is still uncertain and compares offers, Facebook is used to help. Positive reviews and feedback can then influence the purchase decision and create trust in the brand.

Twitter

Twitter is not a very influential platform with 10% weekly users in Germany, but it still offers an interesting factor that can have an impact on your SEO.

News in real time: Twitter is known for spreading news and current events at breakneck speed. In most cases, Twitter is even the first platform used by companies. Search engines like Google have integrated Twitter into their search results to quickly respond to breaking content and news. So, should you want to announce big news, Twitter could be the right choice for that. Thus, the news are not only on Twitter itself, but also influence the search results.

Now that we’ve introduced you to the factors that can influence your SEO strategy, the question becomes: which platform should you use for your business? This question cannot be answered in general terms. It is initially dependent on three factors:

1. Target audience:
   Which platforms does my target group use? If you are in the B2B space, your content is most likely to be consumed on LinkedIn by your target audience. If you are primarily targeting a young demographic, Instagram or Facebook will be used most often by them.
2. The offer or product:
   What is the best way to communicate my offer? Visual with lots of pictures and short texts, like on Instagram. Or with short but informative texts, where the picture does not play such an important role as on LinkedIn.
3. The goal:
   What is my goal? If you want to strengthen your brand presence and thus generate more traffic for your website, then meaningful images or texts on Instagram or Twitter are ideal. If you want to educate people about your company, LinkedIn is more the right platform.

Depending on how intensive your knowledge of your target audience, offering and goal is, you can prioritize or focus entirely on one social media platform.

However, this is not a must: Of course, you can also play on all the presented platforms. The more you link to your website in the process, the more traffic you can generate and strengthen your credibility and relevance for Google and users.

Especially if you are unsure at the beginning which social media platform is the right one for you now, it can be helpful to play on all of them first. Through regular analysis, you can check how your potential customers arrived at your website and optimize accordingly.