SEO Tips for Social Media: Don’t Waste the Opportunity!

You have a tremendous opportunity contained with 140 characters or a few lines of text; making the most of it helps with branding, traffic, sales, exposure, and in building your authority in a given field. While many businesses set up these profiles and then let them languish, there are ways that you can leverage sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in order to get the most from social. Here are some ideas:

Keywords

Social media is an optimal place to interact with consumers, and it can be an opportunity for more to find you. Without pushing it, try to incorporate relevant, and current, keywords into status updates on Facebook. Don’t forget to add keywords naturally to photos as well.

On Twitter, you have a very limited space in which to convey your message. Take advantage of your bio by adding relevant keywords. In individual tweets, get your keyword in the first 27 to 40 characters. This is what appears as the title tag on Google searches. The key is to make sure the keyword is relevant to the rest of the tweet and that it flows with the natural conversation.

With YouTube, make sure that you use relevant keywords throughout your title, description, and keyword section. Some experts recommend using the keyword twice in the title to improve visibility, but only do this if it is natural. You don’t want to appear spammy or to be keyword-stuffing.

bit.ly or tiny.url

URL shorteners like bit.ly and tiny.url are beneficial for a few reasons. They make status updates or tweets easier to read for visitors, and in the case of Twitter, they help your message stay within the character count. They also let you keep the link juice for your original URL. These services use permanent 301 redirects to your content, which benefits your site and not the shortened URL itself.

Beyond Facebook and Twitter

Branch out into other forums, if appropriate. An up-and-comer to try is Quora, a collection of community questions and answers. Not only can you network and reach consumers, it can benefit your search rankings. Quora can positively impact your results on Google searches if you are actively involved in both asking and answering.

There are many other ways to optimise your social profiles. The worst thing to do is nothing.