You probably heard that your business needed a Facebook page, or Twitter account, a Google Plus account, may be Instagram? Tumblr? May be you have one or the other, or both? Do you even know why you should have one of those? Do you know what to do with it? What’s the purpose?
Ranking Signals
First thing first, you have to understand that Google for example uses Facebook and Twitter as a ranking signal. So what does it mean? It means that Facebook and Twitter are not impacting directly your ranking on Google search results BUT Google is trying to figure out a little bit about your reputation online(retweets, likes, shares, etc) Those “signals” will help your ranking.
Which Social Network(s)?
It’s the most common question: which social network or networks should I use? To answer that, let’s look at the top social networks.
- Facebook is definitely THE most popular social network with over a billions users
- Twitter became a top source for real time news sharing
- Google Plus along side all the other Google Apps and Services became a major social network
- YouTube is after Google the biggest search engine and the most popular website for video sharing
- Linkedin as known as the career social network
- Instagram has grown to be one of the most popular social networks for photo sharing
- Pinterest is another photo sharing website with a beautiful and intuitive pinboard-style platform.
- Tumblr is an extremely popular social blogging platform heavily used by teens and younger users.
Now that you have a better understanding on what’s popular, what does what, you can see that you may or may not need one or more of these social networks. For example, if your demographic is not teens, it might be useless for you to have a Tumblr. If you don’t have a whole lot of time to spend on this, I;d say get a Facebook page and a Twitter account, that’s a must! If you have a few more minutes to spend, create a Google profile, set up your G+ account, register your business as well, create a Linkedin profile. One network I haven’t mentioned and especially for local businesses is Yelp. If you have a local business yelp is a must as well! Just do a search for anything and look at the results, I can guarantee you that a lot of results will be Yelp pages. I could get into details and tell you depending on your business which network is important to you, or should I say which network will send Google the right “signals” and increase your reputation online and help your search engine optimization, but every case is unique, every business is unique. Feel free to contact me if you want a free audit on your business and want me to tell you which social networks you should invest on.
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