44. Social Media and SEO

Social media can take many shapes. It’s can be a great way to interact with your customers, promote your products and get more traffic and inbound links. Continue below to find out more about various types of social media services where you can discuss and promote your products and services, while getting links back to your website at the same time.

Why care about social media?

There are many reasons to care about social media and get involved. It’s no secret it can give fast results if you develop great content that gets popular in social media. Indirectly, it can also give more inbound links from people in social media that like your site. With social media, you can be seen and increase brand awareness where it in places where influential people hang around.

Do you have a strategy for social media?

Even if you don’t participate in some of the major social media sites today, it might be a good idea to secure your username (company name) as soon as possible. It’s possible to start out participating in only a few social media websites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Delicious. You can always

How can social bookmarking benefit your online presence?

If you use Internet frequently, it can be helpful to use social bookmarking services. Social bookmarking is a way of storing websites you like, similar to bookmarks in your own Internet browser (ie: IE, Firefox, Chrome etc.) The difference is that you can access your social bookmarks from virtually any computer when you want to approach and share your favourite sites with the world.

Among the most popular social bookmarking websites you find Delicious, Diigo, FolkD, Mangolia and Mister Wong.

Sharing photos in social media

With Flickr, you can upload, store and share photos on other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and through emails and blogs. You can also get feedback on your pictures from photographers and friends. Geotagging is a nice feature with flickr photos, giving you the possibility to see on a map exactly where the photo was taken.

Social networks can make you visible for a large audience

Participating in some of the major social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn can heavily increase your website traffic. People tend to stay on those networks for a long time and even if vistors from these sources don’t stay very long, they often come back to your site if they like it.

Link baits and social content sites

Unique and targeted content can be shared on social content sites such as Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpOn. If you done your research, it might yield a serious amount of ‘likes’ and inbound links.

Be present in forums and blogs

It’s often a good idea to create your own blog and update your content frequently. This is popular among users and give you a boost in search engines due to having fresh material is always preferred.

Doing comment on relevant blogs can also be a good way to create awareness of your brand and website. Some of the most popular blog platforms is blogspot, typepad and wordpress, while technorati provide top lists of blogs in various sectors.

Forums is another type of social interaction, where your need to :

Social media events

When you want to know more, you can participate in social media conferences such as Social Media World Forum. If you are setting up events you want to share, zvents or Socializr can be used.