Some businesses benefit more from social media, but all brands can gain some benefits of social media marketing if they put in the work. Even if you know that social media is never going to be your primary way to pull in leads or drum up interest in your products and services, it’s important to take a second look. Let’s look over the advantages that all brands—yes, even you in your industry—can get by practicing some basic social media marketing.
Search Engine Optimization & Backlinks
Never underestimate the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your company. Often, brands that benefit the least from social media want a strong Google page ranking and generative AI responses, and social media can help with both. An important part of any website’s page is links, and having a healthy number of inbound links (to this page) carries a lot of weight in search algorithms.
This is having one or more social media pages, where you provide links in your biographical information, and posts (such as promoting services or other content marketing like blogs) can help establish backlinks—links from third-party websites back to yours. Google and other search engines prioritize these, and in recent years, also social media over other options. Learn more in our blog, Social Media as SEO: Changes in Both Google and Demographics.
Online Presence and Activity
It’s not just the crawler bots of SEO and AEO that should motivate you to keep a social media presence, but also how people are going to find you online. Online presence is a catch-all term for how people see your business online. Social media is a vital component, alongside others such as:
- Your Website: This should always be your primary platform, capable of generating leads and providing information. Unlike all other options, you can control everything here.
- Business Profiles: Your Google Business Profile and other industry-specific equivalents may be the first things people see when they search on Google and in other directories.
- Social Media: People may search for you on social media sites. Importantly, social media also often serves as a gauge of online activity: not posting regularly may make your company look abandoned.
- Reputation Platforms: Reviews matter, and if you’ve ignored the major platforms like Google, Yelp, and the BBB, that doesn’t mean people haven’t been posting. It’s vital to stay on top of reputation management.
Platform for Events and Community
Lastly, depending on your website, a social media platform can be a useful place to offload certain functionality for your business, such as event management or serving as a place for community or public conversations—even for announcements. Make sure to use the right platform for your needs and industry. It’s important to note that if events or community become a more important part of your marketing and business model, it may make sense to move some or all of it to your own website for security. After all, you can’t control what social media platforms do.
Planning a comprehensive marketing strategy that combines various elements—such as a website, blogs, and social media—to put your business on the virtual map can be hard. But it’s not hard for a marketing agency like Vision. We provide consultation and marketing plans and handle all marketing in-house. Contact us today to learn more and get started. Want to keep reading? Check out the rest of our Vision blogs, our enVisioning Success podcast, and our downloadable Marketing Strategies Playbook.
