Social media marketing (SMM) is one of the major online marketing techniques with the potential to provide a great return on investment. This technique is tightly intertwined with SEO – both being organic, inbound
online marketing strategies. Thus, investing more on SSM can significantly improve your search rankings and thus your visibility. The leading SEO expert of Semalt  Digital Services, Andrew Dyhan, specifies what exactly you need to reap the best from SMM.

1. Find your audience and build your channels early

Your audience influences your choice of social media platform. Once you have determined your target audience, you can then figure out which social platforms will best reach that audience. Take your time to study those platforms in relation to the marketing opportunities they offer. Find out who is talking about topics that interest your business, start listening to them and improvise ways to make them part of your audience.

When it comes to building your channels, don’t wait until the day you are launching your business. Start building your presence early. Provide useful information, connect and talk with others in the industry and brand yourself as an information resource.

2. Maximize the benefit from your social profile

One of the crucial steps in social media marketing is ensuring that your social profiles are filled with information about your business. Well-arranged content with details of your business name, what you do, and contact information forms content that can be indexed. In addition to helping individual customers find you easily, this information helps review sites to find accurate information about your business. Google usually uses entries on review sites to rank sites.

3. Build relationships with business experts and influencers

This is one of the activities to undertake during the initial periods of your
social media marketing strategy because you’ll definitely need influencers and business experts as you down the SSM road. You could start with looking for bloggers and journalists to write about your business. Make sure you are part of their audience too. Read, comment on, and share their content whenever appropriate. This way, you’ll develop relationships that might take your business to unimaginably higher levels.

4. Use social media for syndication

Syndication is creating content and sharing it in its entirety to other platforms instead of providing a link with an excerpt. It is intended to get your content to as many relevant individuals as possible; it’s not designed to directly increase traffic to your site.

Ultimately, syndication through social media showcases your product, increases the chances of your post being included in SERPs, and increases your conversion opportunities.

Why is social media a good syndication platform? Social media has the capability to share content with a big audience. With a huge following, syndication can open your content to thousands of new viewers. Some of them will share, others will link your content in their work, while others could still be converted into new customers.

5. Build inbound links to gain more authority

Inbound marketing utilizes various forms of pull marketing to earn customers’ attention and make the company easier to find. Inbound links determine the authority of a site. Authority is how respectable or trustworthy a site is as a source of information. It is one of the major factors that Google uses to rank search results.

Since social media encourages more inbound links, you can focus more efforts on getting diverse, higher-authority external sites linking your content to maximize on inbound linking. One sure way of attracting such sites is having high-quality, authoritative content yourself, so that those external sites find value in linking to you. Success in SSM is determined by how well these practices are integrated with each other and with SEO. SSM is an aspect that has potential to increase the effectiveness of your online marketing strategy, especially bearing in mind the terrific speed at which social media continues to grow.