What You Need to Know about Using Social Media to Grow Your Business

There are many tasks an individual must perform before venturing into the blogosphere. The first is to sit down and take an assessment of their ability to create, manage, maintain, and grow a blog. This will involve determining the amount of time they will be able to put into the blog, the resources at their disposal, their experiences, areas of expertise, as well as their skills at marketing, web design, and any other relevant areas. Once this has been done, it’s now time to decide on a niche, what kind of blog they want to own, how big they want it to become, and how they want it run.

This series of decisions and assessments has to be mentioned, because blogging is no longer the simple practice it once was. Nowadays, blogging is a full-time career for many, a business via which they hope to make an income and cover daily expenses. This being the case, serious bloggers have to do everything they can to ensure their blog is a success.

Growing Blogs Using Social Media

Social media has been a great marketing tool for the past decade, with platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat creating a whole new avenue for businesses to reach out to customers and potential customers. This has been especially beneficial for small businesses, as it gives them the chance to promote their products to audiences that would otherwise have been impossible to reach. Social media has been such an effective method of marketing that it’s even given rise to the title of ‘social media marketer.’

After creating blog content, publishers are able to advertise on social media via posts, blurbs, shared links, trailers and the like. This form of advertising leads audiences back to the blog, where they can view content and potentially become loyal subscribers. This is all undertaken at no extra cost and is often incredibly effective.

Other bloggers simply choose to post their content exclusively on social media. With sharing, retweets and reposting, these blogs are able to tap into a whole new form of marketing, wherein the content (if good enough) is able to promote itself. ‘Going viral’ refers to a situation where content is rapidly shared across social media. It’s what every social media marketer strives to achieve for its ability to catapult a brand or blog into the limelight.

Optimizing Blogs for Search Engines

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to every action taken to improve a blog’s rankings on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Each have algorithms via which they arrange results whenever a search is made. These results are then ordered, based on their relevance to the search entry and various other parameters. The best results according to the search engines are those placed highest and within the first page. This has prompted businesses to consider Synapse Search Engine Optimizations as an easy way to help them rank better.

Search engines are crucial to blogs, although they’re not always the prime means of acquiring new customers. However, if used effectively, they serve the role well. There are many steps a blog can take to improve its page ranking on search engines. They include:

• Carefully selecting keywords
• Embedding videos
• Creating mobile friendly websites
• Including quality links
• Having well-designed pages

Impact of Social Media on SEO

It must first be acknowledged that social media does not directly improve a webpage or blog’s SEO. This was clearly stated by Matt Cuts, former head of web spam at Google, but this doesn’t necessarily mean what many people suspect. While Google does not take a site’s social media standing into direct consideration, it simply considers the social media accounts on their own. By displaying these accounts, search engines enable users to directly interact with blogs or companies on whatever platforms they choose. Web searches on Google now display social media accounts and posts. This is especially obvious with Twitter accounts that are now displayed in order, based on popularity or retweets.

Social media is incredibly useful at building brand recognition. By advertising content on social media, blogs are able to receive new viewers, who can then be converted into subscribers. The increased traffic created by this conversion will work well towards improving a blog’s SEO.

Link building refers to the process of acquiring more backlinks to your site. Having a blog with great content and a strong presence on social media creates the sort of exposure other brands want to be linked to. Subsequently, those looking to share in a blog’s standing or popularity will often try to link to them. This has a positive impact for both participants’ SEO, creating a win-win scenario.

Bloggers must also take into account that social media platforms are often searched as well, and high ranking accounts or posts always get credence over those ranked lower. Many people find themselves searching for social media accounts that create a particular form of content they’re interested in, so they can follow them. This form of traffic will subsequently have an impact on a blog’s SEO.

Conclusion

Any means of improving a blog’s exposure will eventually reflect on its SEO. While social media does not have a direct impact on SEO, it is still an important avenue for building exposure to a blog. SEO companies know to take these into consideration. If well managed, a blog will achieve anything it sets out to, using social media.