Social media is a staple in modern day marketing. What is unclear, however, is its role in search engine optimization. The importance of social media in SEO has been the subject of endless debates. One of the topics that came out of these debates is social listening. But what’s social listening and how can this help out in getting on top of search results?
Let’s Define What Social Listening is
Social listening also called social media listening or social media monitoring is the act of crawling the Internet, specifically on social media platforms, for mentions of a brand or a product. This is often done through the use of dedicated tools for social listening such as Hootsuite, HowSociable, HubSpot, Social Mention, Sprout Social, and TweetReach.
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These tools are often used to track the popularity of the brand or its products, but these tools can also be used to craft a winning SEO strategy. To improve the effectiveness of your social listening initiatives, the following are 6 of the best tips that can also help out on your SEO efforts:
Check your Analytics
With the power of the tools mentioned above, and other helpful tools available, it is a lot easier to conduct social listening. While these tools generally offer the same functionalities, there are others that go beyond basic social listening and offer more advanced functions such as analytics – something particularly common in paid social listening tools.
Social listening is used to gauge the reputation of your brand or your product but looking at individual sentiments coursed through social media would not be able to properly provide a holistic insight. It is to have made use of the power of analytics to tell what the common or most popular point is.
This allows you to strategize your operations, including your marketing across various platforms, to be able to leverage the findings of your social listening and address identified challenges.
Know Your Audience
Social listening allows you to know your customers better. While you may already have a grasp on who your audience is, social listening allows you to know them on a deeper level. Through social listening, you would know how your audience interacts with your brand, and how they put it out on social media. Doing so will give a better look at how your brand and your product interact with your audience.
It is always a good idea to go beyond demographics for your understanding of who your audience is. You should be able to know them more, and social listening is one of the ways you will be able to do just that. If you know your audience better, you will be able to strategize all your actions toward giving more impact to your audience.
These actions involve your SEO initiatives. By knowing your audience better, you will be able to craft more effective SEO strategies.
Discuss Relevant and Timely Topics
Social listening allows you to unearth topics that are relevant to your audience. But mere knowledge of these topics will not do you any good. What you should do is to make use of these topics to come up with content and campaigns that would be more impactful for your audience.
The key is to be able to appeal better to your audience by talking about topics that are more relevant to them. As content is a major aspect of SEO, it is important to come up with timely pieces regularly. But to make it even more effective, your content should talk about themes and topics that matter to them. With social listening, you will be able to do that better.
Find Opportunities in Unlinked Mentions
Social listening can help you find opportunities in unlinked mentions. There might be mentions of your brand or your products but didn’t include a link to you maybe because the author didn’t intend to link externally, or to link to anything at all for that matter.
It is an important task to find these unlinked mentions, that to reach out, and ask them to provide a link. It will then be a good idea to relaunch that mention strategically so that traction can be gained from that updated mention which now links to your site.
This is one of the best reasons why you should do social listening, and how you can do it to your advantage.
Take Advantage on Social Influencers on Your Industry
Social media influencers are people on social media who can command huge followings. One way to be able to have people talking about your brand is by working together with select social media influencers, and to have them talk about your brand and your product offerings.
The best way to do this is to identify an influencer whose followers closely resemble your target audience. This way, your efforts would be targeted towards people who are more likely to respond positively to your marketing strategies whether that be on social platforms such as Facebook or non-social platforms such as your website. So work on looking for your ideal partner influencer and work on some winning tactics that can help boost your brand.
Pro tip: Here are a few Social Media Marketing Guides from reputable sources.
Monitor your Competitors
Finally, you can make use of social listening to check out the competition. Spying on your competitors through social listening allows you to know how their target audience perceives their efforts. You are bound to see both positive and negative reception towards their brand such as what can happen to you. It is then your responsibility to take action by avoiding these things your audience may particularly not receive well, and then maximize on things that your audience adore. The key is to be able to figure out what works for your audience by spying on the performance of your competitors and working on the findings you will get.
Boost your Social Listening and Boost your SEO
The above tips are some of the ways for which mere social listening can help improve your SEO strategy. Follow these tips and effectively come up with a winning SEO strategy that is most likely to deliver the results you expect.
Follow these six strategies today and see how social listening can give your SEO initiatives the boost they need.
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