Is Social Signal Essential to Your Business?

By Georgi Todorov

A social signal isn’t that little wave you do to say hi to someone across the room. It’s actually one of the latest buzzwords to be added to the growing digital marketing movement. 

The terms like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 

Every like, share or view your posts receive on social media will actively contribute to your business’s organic search rankings on these leading search engines. These refer to a brand’s collective likes, shares, and social media visibility as perceived by popular search engine rankings can be compared to citations and act in a similar way to backlinks, driving valuable traffic towards your website and ensuring increased brand awareness.

Social media is so much more than a simple social and messaging technology. 

Today, it has become an essential tool that can directly impact your SEO, your brand visibility, and the success of your small business. This makes it essential for eCommerce operations and other businesses to create effective social media strategies that focus on promoting high-value campaigns and quality products to the right target audiences.

Raising Your Brand’s Social Signal Through Social Media

Any business’s primary strategy when it comes to raising its social signal is to focus on crafting and sharing quality content on social media. Most of the world’s online sharing now takes place on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok. This makes social signals as important to search engine optimization as marketing metrics, content quality, and editorial linking.

If you are looking to improve your brand’s search rankings online, a comprehensive social media strategy will be invaluable to your goal. Plans designed to increase your social media engagement rates can boost your website’s search engine rankings, improve your lead conversion rates, and ultimately increase your sales.

When raising social signals, the first place to start is creating strong, entertaining, and informative content. High-quality blog posts, business images, videos, and infographics will always attract more positive attention from social media users than aggressive or spam-laden advertising. 

Let’s start with the basics. Some trusted and proven strategies for increasing your social signals include:

• Post daily to keep your brand at the top of your followers’ feeds and boost brand awareness.
• Using images to improve interaction rates across all social channels.
• Listening to your followers’ feedback about your brand and constructing it in a respectful, proactive, and positive way.
• Monitoring your shares, likes, retweets, and hashtag usage through a social media marketing app or tool.
• Maximize exposure potential by using targeted hashtags through Instagram hashtag finder
• Teaming up with other popular brands and influencers to share links and produce unique, custom content.
• Hosting giveaways and competitions to increase interest in your brand.
• Producing content for all of the top media sites your target customers use most frequently.

10 Reasons Why Social Media is Crucial to Your Business

Social media usage and gaining social signal is critical to the success of modern small businesses for a number of reasons. 

Here are 10 reasons why you should consider investing in your own social strategy.

#1: Improved Brand Reputation

Most social media sites also function as review and rating sites for B2C businesses. Maintaining a strong presence on the social sites your audience is using will allow them to review your products and services and give you valuable feedback to work with. 

You can use social media as a platform through which to address negative reviews professionally and maintain your brand’s good reputation, even among dissatisfied customers.

#2: Better SEO Results

SEO and social media should go hand in hand as part of a cohesive digital marketing strategy. Your aim should be to create clear links between your website and your business’s social profiles by featuring social content on your site and linking your website back to your social media profiles. Optimize for user experience metrics like site speed and interactivity as well.

It’s recommended that you implement a plan to create as much engaging content on social media platforms as your leading industry competitors do. This will keep your brand competitive in the realms of search rankings and social media followings. 

#3: Streamlined Public Relations

Social media is the ultimate cost-effective tool for sharing important company messages, news, and updates. You can use a variety of platforms, from LinkedIn and Twitter to Instagram and Snapchat, to spread the news about what your brand is up to behind the scenes. 

Spreading positivity and gaining social goodwill often attracts the most engagement from users, which in turn increases the size of your audience and improves your brand awareness and its visibility on feeds and timelines.

#4: Enhanced Funnel Development

Your social signal and social media strategy can provide valuable insights into user journeys, assisted conversions, and differing attribution models. This data will show you exactly how your social media presence is impacting your conversion funnel and will allow you to adjust your posting strategies accordingly.

#5: More Agile Marketing Efforts

Agile marketing is a necessary approach in today’s fast-paced and interconnected world. This strategy includes small, regular investments in content and quick-fire testing to make targeted adjustments that can be rolled out every couple of weeks. 

Social media platforms are the perfect places to trial content and ideas and to judge engagement and interest in them. It’s quick, cost-effective, and easy to deploy social marketing campaigns, and they can be updated as frequently as necessary to ensure maximized efficacy. 

#6: Lead Prospecting

Social media gives small businesses a chance to organically foster brand awareness amid a larger referral audience. Followers that engage with their content will quickly find it showing up in their feeds, and businesses can amplify this benefit by sponsoring ad content to target extended follower networks. 

#7: Gathering Industry Insights

Social media has a wealth of valuable insights to offer. You can monitor your competitors and use social listening tools to follow your audience and gain knowledge about their needs, desires, requirements, beliefs, and ethics. These short and long-term insights can then advise strategies, assist in the creation of products and content, and instruct larger, more informed marketing initiatives.

#8: Effective Recruitment

It’s easier to recruit skilled and passionate employees for your business if you’ve cultivated increased brand awareness on social platforms. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can all be used to show prospective hires what your company culture is all about and how they can benefit from joining your team.

Top Tips on Improving Your Social Media Engagement

There are many ways to increase your social media engagement rates and give your social signal a boost. Many small businesses use tools like Sniply, IFTTT, and Buffer to simplify their content curation processes and create meaningful social media posts for their followers. 

Here are some additional tips on how to expand your social media engagement rates and raise brand awareness in the digital space.

• Post content that users will want to engage with. People are far more likely to engage with funny, relatable, emotional, or otherwise valuable content. Your primary focus should be on posting content that elicits positive reactions from your audience and delights, inspires, or amuses them.
• Encourage your audience to like, comment, and share your content. Add a call to action at the end of every post requesting that your audience likes it, drop a comment, or share it with a friend if they enjoyed it. People are more likely to do these things if you ask them to, making this a simple and free way to improve your social signal. 
• Respond to all of your comments. Your brand needs to be social to find success on social media. Customers that comment on your posts and send you direct messages are giving you a valuable opportunity to start a conversation and create a connection.

Show your appreciation for positive messages and provide actionable, empathetic resolutions for negative ones. The only time you don’t need to respond is if a user tags a friend and doesn’t mention your brand directly.

• Find more followers. Brands that have fewer than 100 social media followers will enjoy less engagement than those with hundreds or thousands. The larger your audience, the more engagement your posts are likely to attract!
• Ask your followers questions. This is another quick, easy and free way to boost engagement with your posts. For example, you could post a question on your Instagram stories asking your fans whether you prefer pizza or pasta, sneakers or flats, and so on. You could ask them about their favorite products from your brand and share their answers, tagging them in the shared versions. 

This gives your followers the impression that you genuinely value their opinions and provides you with a fantastic insight into their expectations of your brand, too.

It’s Time to Boost Your Signal 

Improving your business’s social signal is a key factor in improving your business’s organic search rankings and boosting brand awareness to the right people. 

Put simply, the more active you are on social networks, the better your social signal on search engines. 

It’s not just because the world is becoming more reliant on social media. Consumers are starting to use platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as the new word of mouth. And that kind of exposure for your business is invaluable.

From content creation to social sharing, building your social signal can be a bit overwhelming. But with some strategic thinking, and constant, authentic engagement with your customers and leads, you’ll have increased social signal in the bag!

  Back to Small Business blogs