Brands must ensure the content and conversations they create can be found
Successful social media marketers do a lot more than set up a profile. They invest real effort in creating and distributing content to their followers, facilitating conversations, developing contests or games, and persuading interested consumers to connect with them.
This makes Facebook pages and Twitter profiles valuable landing pages for the brand. But in many cases, those pages aren’t easy for consumers to find via search.
SEO platform BrightEdge found that less than a third of the top 200 brands in the Fortune 500 had Facebook pages that appeared in the first 20 Google results for the brand’s name. Nearly half of brands did not appear in the top 40 results.
SEO for Twitter profiles was in a similar state. Only about a third of brands studied had a profile in the top 20 search results.
The same SEO best practices that apply to regular webpages can also boost search rankings for social profiles, according to BrightEdge. For example, linking to a Facebook page or Twitter profile from the company’s main site will pass along authority.
In addition, keeping the content on social media pages fresh and recent boosts SEO. Almost half of business-to-business marketers surveyed by BtoB Magazine and Business.com in July 2010 said social media had helped their search performance, most often as a way to drive inbound links, but also because they were able to build out profile pages to increase their rankings.
SOURCE eMarketer