Can social media affect SEO?

Social signals play a significant role on Search Engines Rankings as an effective link building method whilst data deriving from social media are largely used by Search Engines. What is the goal? Increased website referral traffic and higher revenue

Social signals improve rankings in various ways. The number of people liking the page, the number of shares, the number of followers, the number or retweets, the quota of followers/following, can impact the organic SEO (particularly the referral traffic). Additionally all these social signals generated by the abundance of social media (like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter etc.), can increase significantly brand awareness and online visibility.

The value of social signals as ranking factor gradually increases, since even Google has admitted that social signals is a ranking factor.  Brands have started realizing that:

• social media increase their power and new generation spends more time on these channels interacting with their brands.
• people trust more a brand recommended by their friends in social media.

You can now increase your social media presence in  6 immediate steps:

a. Register your brand to social media by creating appealing and meaningful content for users, include links that will point to your website.

b. Create onsite elements leading to sites like share buttons, connect buttons (like button) and social bookmarks.

c. Create onsite a blog and update it with valuable rich in links articles and topics.

d. Integrate social media and blog announcing through all channels the new post and take full advantage of share (use of social bookmarking services) and connect buttons already mentioned before.

e. Creation of infographics with appealing content and design is an interesting and effective way of acquiring links. If the design is visually appealing the content of info are important, then it is most likely this content to be shared via social media channels creating a social buzz.

f. Quantify the impact of your reach to the audience by using analytics, such as Google Analytics and according to your data you can increase your efforts on social media channels.

Via Google Analytics, it is feasible to measure the impact of your social media activity, by visiting:

Traffic Sources  -> Sources -> Referrals

If you want to receive more elaborate results, you do it via Advanced Segments (custom). Depending on the kind of data you wish to keep track of, you can define any value you want.

For example you want to see if social media generate revenue. So, in this case, the visual result of your actions should look something like that: