Social Media and your website

In today’s world people often wonder how social media impacts their findability on Google searches.  Here are some important things to know:

1. Google is the number one search engine (80% of all searches in the world) so I recommend doing whatever Google suggests.
2. Get a Google Plus profile set up for your business.  No one in any real measurable sense is using google plus, but just having an account and pointing your website to it makes Google happy and they bump up your rankings just for doing it.  Also having people follow you bumps the numbers up as well.
3. LinkedIn is a B2B (business to business) form of social media.  It is here for business and people have gotten jobs and referrals from it.  Also Google rankings like to see inbound links to your website and this is just another way to get those important inbound links.  An inbound link is a website out in cyberspace that links back to your website.  The higher they rank, the more important that inbound link is to your website.  The best inbound links are websites that are considered an authority.  LinkedIn would be considered an authority.  How can you be sure about the authority?  A website called Page Rank Checker helps (prchecker.info).  It gives a rank from N/A or 0 of no rank all the way to 10.  A 10 being google so no one gets that rank. Rank your site and rank the site of those inbound links.
4. Facebook is more people to people but businesses have been in there now for a while and getting people to like and follow your page is great exposure for your business.  I had a client who had 1,500 followers for their local store.  They post once a day or every other day.  The things they posted were new things in the store or special events.  It worked because people would show up to see the new stuff or check out the new deals.  As my daughter once said “Pictures!  Or it didn’t happen!”.  Post pictures and even videos if you can.  A good image or video always gets good response over plain text.  Facebook also offers analytics to see when and who is looking at your posts.  You can even post 5 things at once and set a timer to post one at a time for 5 days.
5. Twitter is a a good one for by the minute responses.  I there was a tire store that had a twitter account but they also had a program called TweetDeck which allow them to have key words monitoring.  So if someone mentioned their name for example, an alert would pop up.  A lady was in the waiting room waiting for her car to be worked on.  She tweeted the name of the tire shop and complained about the long wait.  Within moments a response came back from the tire store apologizing for the delay and offering a discount for the trouble.  THAT IS POWERFUL STUFF!  That instantly turned a complaint into a praise live on the internet.

The key to social media is to pick two or three to be involved and then post appropriately.  Google plus? Check it once a week or every other week. LinkedIn? Once a week.  Twitter? have a program like TweetDeck monitoring it.  Facebook? check daily but limit it to 15 minutes a day.  Post and check your analytics.

Social media can certainly enhance your website, but yo have to be disciplined about it.  Or get yourself an expert who can do it for you!