Facebook lets Google crawl its platform to index all its contents — comments, videos, pictures, and so on. When people look for things on Google, the search engine looks on Facebook and other social media platforms, and applies its search algorithms to their contents to find posts that may be of relevance. This means that when you post on social media for your brand, it would make sense to apply the rules of SEO (search engine optimization) to what you write or create, in order to get in front of more people.
How do you apply SEO when you post to social media?
Write memorable captions
Businesses often pick content writers to be their social media managers. In part, this is because it takes deep writing skills to put great social media captions together. Good captions to go with images get the idea across, are engaging to read, are concise, and put effective SEO rules into practice. Good captions include hashtags, shoppable keywords, and clickable links that take the viewer to a product page; they are also readable and interesting.
Feature people with great SEO rankings in your social media posts
Google takes social media influence into account when it ranks pages on its search results. You get improved social media influence by tying up with popular social media influencers, and having them promote your brand. Collaborating in this way doesn’t necessarily involve paid agreements. All you need to do when you post on social media is to tag popular influencers in your industry. You may have sound reason to tag them if you have something meaningful to say about them — say, to pay them a compliment for their work. You right away get in front of their followers, and benefit from improved search engine rankings.
It’s also a good idea to encourage user-generated content on your social media accounts. Photo contests, for example, are a great way to get your users to engage with your brand, and tag, like, and comment on your page. All these actions make for improved SEO visibility.
Many successful brands use social listening tools. Whenever they detect a mention of their brand anywhere on social media, they quickly jump on it. Such timely and regular engagement with different social media users and influencers can make for a better network of social media mentions, and improved search engine rankings.
Make every product mention shoppable
Users on Instagram discover new products on the platform on a regular basis. Millions of users tap on posts to see product tags each day. These kinds of engagement drive traffic to your website, and improve your SEO.
Making product mentions clickable — so that they lead directly to product pages — is a good idea. Great visuals to accompany these product images can help with SEO, too. Getting great images of your products on Pinterest can help you feature on Google Image searches. You simply need to make sure that your images, whether on Pinterest or any other social network, are appropriately labeled with keyword phrases that are commonly used by your audience. The text that you use in your labeling helps your SEO.
Help your videos show up in searches
Nine out of 10 web users watch at least some video each month. Since Google owns YouTube and gives preference to YouTube videos in its search results, in addition, getting on YouTube makes for sound SEO.
Even once you do decide on a YouTube presence, you need to pay attention to properly optimizing your videos for search.
Make your videos short: one in two YouTube viewers abandon the videos they watch past the two-minute mark. YouTube’s algorithm doesn’t rate videos highly, however, when viewers abandon them partway. Planning to keep your videos under two minutes, then, is a good way to make sure that people watch to the end. If your subject matter requires longer durations, you could do what Walmart does: when it has many points to cover, it makes a 30-second video out of each point, and puts all the videos together in a playlist. Most users are likely to stay the course with videos of such short length, giving you improved reputation on the YouTube search engine.
Make full transcripts: When you create a video and publish it, the video page on your YouTube creator’s account displays a Transcript button that shows you automatically created closed captioning, and lets you either create more accurate transcripts, or transcripts in different languages. When you have text transcripts of your videos, you are more accessible to both the Google and YouTube search engines, and you help them find and boost your videos.
Make use of hashtags: Many people use hashtags when they search for videos on the internet. Your efforts on Twitter can even bring you results outside of the platform. It’s important to do research on the most searched hashtags in your industry, create videos for them, and promote them with those hashtags.
Search engine optimization begins with good content marketing — even on social media. With the meaningful application of keywords added, with efforts made to engage your community, and with images and videos that are optimized for search, you will be well on your way to a search-optimized social media presence.
