Search-marketing pundits almost everywhere are agreed – your social media presence plays a part in determining your SERPs rankings. That’s where the agreement ends; heated debate rages about the specific factors that make the difference. Given Google’s dominance of Internet search, it’s no surprise that Google+ is high on most people’s list, but finding a consensus on other influential mechanisms seems impossible.
Social Media Examiner’s 2012 report into the Social Media Marketing Industry sheds a great deal of light on this constantly evolving marketplace, and any would-be social media expert should take a look at the major findings. Of more than 3,800 marketers surveyed, 94 percent used social media to market businesses, with the top two reported benefits being greater exposure and increased traffic.
There is a clear vote for the SEO benefits of social media – more than half the respondents reported improved search rankings as a result of social networking. Unsurprisingly, the more effort you put in, the better it gets; looking only at marketers with three or more years experience of social media, three-quarters had seen better SERPs ranking as a result.
SEO also found favor in its own right. A large majority, in response to the question “How will you change your non-social activities in future?” planned to give increased priority to search engine optimization – the single most popular response.
Putting the report to one side for now, take a look at other pundits who share differing views on the “SEO factors” unique to social media.
In a 2011 article for Search Engine Watch, Eric Enge concludes that authority is as important in a social-media context as it is in pure-and-simple SEO. In the same way that backlinks from authoritative websites feed “SEO juice” to your site, a Share or a Like from a high-authority individual will have a more beneficial effect on your content than multiple signals from Joe Public.
Enge did more digging in an attempt to reveal the approach taken by some of the major players in search. Talking to Duane Forrester, senior product manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program, he established that although content is still king when it comes to ranking, social media is now a close second. Perhaps controversially, Forrester opines: “At some point, social [media] could be more important than content.”
In March 2012, talking to Sagar Kamdar, group product manager for Google Search, Enge explores the role of Google+, and authorship in particular. Kamdar explains that Google sees the authorship program as a way to connect authors and readers, stressing its role in confronting “the faceless nature of the web.” For example, instead of simply enjoying an individual piece of content, users can “collect” content written by a specific author – directly from SERPs.
In a separate article, Social Media Examiner reinforces the Google+ authorship message and highlights the need to connect your Google+ page directly to your website. Both actions have the potential to increase your coverage in SERPs, and to promote more of your content than would otherwise see the light of day. The importance of authority resurfaces, this time with the emphasis on increasing your own social standing by attracting followers and collecting +1s.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land attempts to flush out answers to some commonly asked social-media SEO questions. Inter alia, he reveals that both Google and Bing weight search results to take account of tweets and retweets of an article, as well as the social authority of the person tweeting. It’s clear, concludes Sullivan, that “if there’s PageRank for pages, both search engines have a form of TwitterRank for people.”
Before you rush out to dominate the social authority scene, take a minute to revisit the Social Media Examiner report. The #1 question that respondents wanted answering is this:
How do I measure the effect of social media marketing on my business?
It sounds obvious, but this is the area where the most gains are to be made, and probably one of the most neglected. In a speech at Stanford University in May 2009, Dan Siroker, who headed Barack Obama’s social media and social networking websites during his 2008 election campaign, put metrics top of his list. Whatever else you do, find a way to measure the effect of your social-media activity and focus on techniques that work for you. Ignore Siroker’s advice, and you’ll likely work a lot of hours for nothing.
Two final words of advice: be patient.
Most of the businesses surveyed by Social Media Examiner invested at least three years in active social-media marketing before seeing results. If you’re in, you’re in for the long haul – get it right and the benefits are yours for the taking.
