Content Marketing & Digital PRSocial Media Content How does social media help to improve my brand’s online visibility? Apr 25th, 2016 Content & Marketing Exec Chloie Brandrick explains the importance of social media marketing in raising your business’ profile… The buzz created by regular social media activity is important in boosting your brand’s online reach and credibility. Amplifying your content through these channels is a powerful way of spreading your message to a relevant audience and increasing brand awareness – and is therefore a vital part of any content marketing campaign. It offers the opportunity for your content to reshared: the higher the relevance and quality of those shares, the greater the chance your content gets seen by the right audience, and attracts the right kind of traffic. Whether you’re sharing a link to your website, a piece of content, asking a question, or offering a light-hearted musing from within the office, social offers a unique opportunity to engage with your audience on a personal level, and give your brand an informal voice that goes beyond the traditional corporate message. Like a good quality, natural back link profile, social engagement represents a public endorsement of your website and, as it’s user-generated and authentic, it’s considered trustworthy by users (known as ‘social proof’). What does this mean for me? So maintaining an up-to-date social profile and regularly engaging with your audience on these platforms will certainly help to improve your online visibility, influence and reputation. Remember social media was never intended for communication to flow only one way – the idea is to encourage interaction with your audience and respond to their comments and questions. You can boost this type of interaction by including a link to your website in your social profiles to increase the quality of traffic to your website, and vice versa, including share buttons on your website. Does Google take my social media activity into account? According to Searchmetrics, social signals correlate strongly to better organic search rankings, perhaps in part because a high number of social signals implies that the site regularly adds new content and this plays a role in driving direct traffic and brand awareness. But this correlation does not imply causation. Although Google continually emphasises that it is not using social signals as a direct ranking factor, the evidence suggests that it pays to have a strong social media marketing policy in place. Download our free social media toolkit, or give us a call today on 0845 205 0292 to find out how we can help your business to grow.