Do you use the social media as a link building tool within your SEO strategies?

Link building as an SEO tool

Well I advise everybody to document everything they do, but *UNFORTUNATELY* I do not practice what I preach...

I do need to start doing this myself, as when the smelly stuff collides with the wind making machine, and your rankings go south at a great rate of knots, and you have not been keeping good records of what is done, what is not done, and who is responsible for the different pieces of your SEO then you have *REALLY BIG PROBLEMS*

Keeping checklists for tasks, and who is responsible to ensure that the task is integrated into your total marketing plan can be a real pain in the wrong spot, but it sure helps when problems decide to show their true colours and your online rankings take a tumble.

Most marketing managers, and especially those within the *SOCIAL MEDIA ARENA* do not fully comprehend the needs to integrate all your marketing both online and off line into a single marketing plan, where SEO and related\matters take the steering wheel and control many of the marketing issues in a well managed and efficient manner, that pushes your online content closer to the top of the SERP's  (Search engine Results ages) in many strange and devious ways.

Social media is the biggest and (currently) most powerful link building platform that we have ever experienced.  How you use the social media to create powerful link building opportunities for your online work is not well understood, and then there are them folks that tell you *LINK BUILDING IS DEAD* who confuse many, and cause a vast array of different problems within the SEO Industry.

Links are still one of the most  vital parts of your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts and their value must not be underestimated.

That being said, one must also not underestimate the damage that can be caused by link farms and other bad link building tactics.  How you conduct your link-building practices does need to be  clearly defined  and documented as part of your SEO policy.  Then you also need to keep records of all social media posts that are part and parcel of your  link building activities.

Your company link building policy document, which is a sub-document in your SEO policy  must be shared across all marketing platforms, both online and off line, as every marketing effort has some impact on your SEO.  This could be in the way that you influence your target market audience to use specific key words in their search queries or how you influence your copy writer to frame certain issues, or any number of other seemingly UN-important issues.

Social media managers need to be on top of the issues that impact on your SEO, and use these intelligently when passing  instructions to  others  like, but not limited to the list below. :

• what to promote, 
• how to promote specific issues,
• where and when to promote your other online efforts.
• what links to use within specific social media posts
• how to frame social media posts that link to other social media profiles
• how to ensure that the author of specific articles gets credits for their online works

 If you are not using the social media as a link building tool for your bog and your web site, then you are loosing out an a great opportunity.  From a #FUFISM based\perspective the social media is the powerhouse of you link building strategy, and this needs great care and lots of *SPECIAL ATTENTION* to details as supplied by your SEO team.

Those who tell you that link building is dead, need to be viewed as suspect, and their intentions need to be evaluated carefully.  You need to have an honest discussion with them about the value of social media in general, and what impacts the social media has on your SERP's. (Search Engine Results Pages)  If they tell you that the use of SOCIAL MEDIA improves your SERP's, then you need to ask them to explain exactly how this is done, and if this can be achieved without linking to your online content from your social media posts at all.

listen carefully to their explanations, and ask questions!!!!

Evaluate and then decide which way, because many have been ill advised that link building is dead, and these people may be acting on that advice, which is very dangerous.

Remember that there is plenty of bad advice online, so take your time and evaluate all advice carefully,  before accepting or rejecting any advice.

See these links to expand the conversation on the value of link building...

http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2014/04/social-media-issues-and-serps.html (Social media and SERP's)
http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2012/09/is-seo-dead.html  (Is SEO DEAD?)
http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_4.html    (Issues with Link building)
http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2014/07/what-is-value-of-link-in-2014.html  (what is the value of a link)
http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-link-building-tactics-do-you-use.html (what link building tactics do you use)
http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html  (what is SEO)

Just in case you need to know more specifics about any component of your SEO policy,  remember that you can use our internal search tool to search for specific subjects within the SEO field.   Look in the top right of the screen when using a laptop or PC...  If you do not find what you are looking for when using our search tool, then leave a comment and our team will try and help you out as best we can.  If we can not help you directly we will refer you to and expert who can.

How do you measure the impact of your social media efforts?

Measuring the impacts of your social media efforts is a difficult task at best, but how do you connect this to your bottom line?

In my opinion all social media efforts are in place to funnel online activity to your call to action pages that are manged out side of the social media arena. Others will have different opinions and explain why they think the way they do.

Social media is a very powerful marketing tool, but there are difficulties in measuring its success. having  a large number of Facebook followers does not necessarily translate into a large number of people buying your product or using your service, and the correlation between face book likes and feet in to physical stores is quite difficult as followers may live in foreign countries / out of state .

That is why target market selection is critical in your social media efforts. FB adds can be very effective if you use the Geo-targeting tools made available, but still extremely difficult to measure. Other  social media operators also allow for Geo-marketing but none offer any tools on how to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

how do you tie your social media efforts to your bottom line? read here and then decide which way you want to go, and what actions you can take to convince your boss to spend more on social media marketing.

I firmly believe that your social media efforts need to be seen as promoting  your existing online sales and marketing efforts which need to be managed as a collective entity keeping your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) policies and principles in place and ensuring complete integration of all your marketing / online sales channels.

If you do this  you will have the tools to measure the success of your marketing efforts and keep tabs on the separate parts with out loosing the fact that they are part of an integrated system.  read this and think about what I have said here today