Traditionally, social networks have been seen as a way to connect with your friends and family. While social networks are great for this, they also provide an excellent outlet for businesses to promote their services. You’re probably wondering what Facebook or Twitter can do for your company, and my response is – what can’t they do?
Social networks are excellent for…
- Developing a relationship with your customers
- Promoting packages, special events, discounted rates and contests
- Growing your customer database
- Gathering important information about your demographic
- Building relationships with other businesses in your area
- Providing information about your company and its developments
- Keeping your brand fresh in the mind of your consumers
- Increasing traffic to your website
How Social Media Can Help Your SEO
Until recently, hotel social media had no effect on the search engine rankings for hotel websites, making it strictly an outlet for businesses to build a database of followers away from their site, then forcing them to link back to it. Now, public Facebook shares and Tweets can actually help promote your organic ranking in the search engines.
Google now takes into consideration how many tweets, re-tweets, “likes” and “shares” your followers give you. They’ve decided that if there is active conversation and interaction with your company via social media, this would mean that you’re popular and Google wants to reward you for this. Remember, the search engines’ main purpose is to provide its users with the most relevant information.
Who Should I Target?
There have been studies done to analyze how to get the most SEO bang for your buck through social media interaction. Similar to Page Rank, accounts that are deemed credible or extremely popular will have a greater influence on the SERP results, so it is best to focus your energy to getting these high profile people to re-tweet or share your link. These accounts will also have a greater reach, which, if lucky, will result in their network distributing your information.
It is also important to note that the number of times your information is redistributed has also proven to be correlated to improved search engine rankings. Social networks already had numerous benefits for internet marketing purposes, and now with this change they are even more multi-faceted than ever. So what are you waiting for? Get your tweet on!