You may have that one friend who always casually mentions how many friends they have to look cool. It may seem annoying, almost narcissistic, but it is an effective social interaction strategy to get attention and build up your value in a group.

The same strategy can also be used in digital marketing to improve your SEO. Suppose there is a large number of people endorsing your business or talking about your products. Those endorsements can quickly raise the level of trust that other people have in what you offer, even if they have never actually bought any products or services from you.

In this blog, we look at the importance of social signals and how guest blogs are an effective medium for displaying value to your audience.

What Are Social Signals?

Social signals are measured on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. They are the total number of human interaction metrics that your profile or posts get.

Some examples of social signals include likes, dislikes, shares, ratings, pins, re-tweets, comments, views, etc. These metrics help users see the popularity and affinity for a specific profile or piece of published content.

Why Are Social Signals Important?

Social signals are important for businesses and content creators to understand the impact of their marketing effort and content.

For example, suppose you publish two posts (or tweets) on your page (or profile), and both of them have a similar message with different design styles. One of the posts gets a few dozen likes then disappears into oblivion. The other post gets attention, receiving hundreds of likes, shares, and comments.

Obviously, you need to study the post that received more attention and see why it was more popular. Perhaps it had something to do with the timing of the day or the day of the week? Maybe it had a design style that was easier on the eyes and made people react to it instantly? Perhaps the post was more intriguing or controversial, drawing a bigger response from people?

The higher social signals for the post suggest that you did something right. If you analyze why it got more hits, you can significantly improve your marketing effort and reach a bigger audience more effectively.

The Link between Social Signals and SEO

The main goal of search engines is to provide high-quality and relevant content to users with the information that they seek. Search engines gauge the quality and relevancy of a website based on how other people interacted with it.

Previously, search engines like Google only looked at website content and keywords to determine how useful it can be for users. Since most online users have moved to social media now, search engines have also started integrating social signals as a ranking signal for their search results.

What it means is that if your website has a higher social signal on popular platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, its search engine ranking will also get higher. If you post blogs and articles on your website and they get hundreds of shares and mentions on social media, that will raise the SEO rank for your website.

How Can You Improve Your Website’s Social Signal?

Businesses that seriously want to increase their digital footprint will need to follow a comprehensive social media strategy. They must focus on building their following on popular social media platforms and find ways to improve user engagement.

Two of the most important things to do are to share high quality content and do it consistently. What is high quality content, you ask?

Basically, good quality content is what gets more engagement from people on social media. Your content can be entertaining, making people want to look at more of what you’ve posted before. It can be informative and educational, offering solutions to some of the problems that people are searching for online.

Even click-baity content can be considered valuable, at least for the short term. You can get away with it when you are still trying to set up your social media account. However, people are smart and catch up. Relying on spammy content or content that is too promotional without offering anything of value won’t work well.

Here are some tried and tested tips for improving your social signals.

• Post daily: This helps keep your brand at the top of social media news feeds for users. If someone misses your post from today, they may catch your post from yesterday. But if you post once a week, you are unlikely to get viewed.
• Use Images: Images are more powerful than text and significantly increase interaction for all types of social platforms.
• Use Videos: The downside to videos is that they take time to view, and they are more expensive to produce. However, they can be great tools for building credibility and explaining your offerings in detail.
• Use Guest Blogs: Blogs and snippets remain very powerful, especially when it comes to SEO. The trick here is to host the blog on your website and post a preview on Twitter or Facebook. It should be intriguing enough to rope people onto your website.
• Research Social Mentions and Engage: Look at what your followers, customers, employees and competitors are saying about your brand and respond to critique in a constructive and positive way.
• Use Analytical Tools: There are hundreds of useful social media tools that you can use to track shares, re-tweets, likes and keywords associated with your brand. Use them to get a bigger picture.
• Run Contests: Contests and giveaways are a great way to attract an audience and generate interest in your products and services.
• Partner with Other Businesses: There are two important rules of social media. Never be shy or reserved to ask for help. And never be selfish about helping out someone when they ask for support, within reason. Helpful allies online can go a long way in building a successful brand.

Guest Blogging

Speaking of partnering with other businesses, guest blogging can be a great way to build your profile reach. Many businesses use guest blogging as an essential part of building their marketing funnel.

Guest blogging can help you build brand awareness and reach out to potential customers and suppliers. It grows your business network while also improve your digital footprint. It tells new audiences about your business and makes it easier to leave a link, which helps raise your domain authority.

The new readers may visit your website or social media page, attracting new subscribers and improving lead generation.

Conclusion

Social media platforms will remain important for marketing products and attracting customers. They are so important that thousands of businesses make social media their primary (and only) digital platform. 

If you are not using social signals to attract more people, you could be missing out on a lot of potential customers. Hopefully, the blog can be useful for you to get started on the right footing.

Guest article written by: As a Sr. Editor, Steven Dean and his team of seasoned content writers and guest blog writers at Content Development Pros are experts at creating SEO-optimized content for small, midsize and large businesses. They perform analyses of your marketing plan, your industry-specific needs, the platforms you want to rank on, as well as what your vision is for your organization before they create tailored SEO plans and content.