Bolstering your approaches to search engine optimization, especially in the local sense, is sure to have a positive impact on your business. Expanding your efforts in this field involves a number of approaches, and one of those techniques involves social media signals. Understanding how these signals can help promote your business is sure to encourage you to dabble more in this field.
Understanding Social Signals
Getting the word about your business in Miami out there involves the use of social signals. In order to implement this strategy, however, you must understand what social signals are. Essentially, social signals refer to quantitative ways that people can assess how popular your business is when they’re checking out the company on social media. For example, think about your company’s Facebook page and the number of likes that it currently has. This number is a social signal. Visitors to your site can quantitatively assess how popular your business is by looking at the number of likes the business page has.
Other Social Signals
The number of likes for your company’s overall page is one social signal. However, plenty of others exist. For example, people might assess the number of likes any one particular photo or status update of your business. This process could happen on both Facebook or Instagram. On Twitter, followers might see how many times a status gets retweeted, and on Pinterest, your business might be judged by the amount of content that users have pinned. Social signals can also appear on review sites, which also hold a prominent role in terms of local SEO. For example, countless five-star and four-star reviews on Yelp could certainly help to generate a more positive perspective of your company.
Negative Numbers
Right now, you might be envisioning all of the likes that your most recent photo had or how many times people retweeted your latest status updates. Remember that numbers can also work against you. In other words, you don’t want to merely focus on putting out as many social signals are possible; you want to ensure that those social signals are of a positive variety. Return to the Yelp page. Consider what would happen if your company had only one or two positive reviews. Visitors might assume that these reviews were written by your own relatives or friends. Also, Facebook now allows users to comment with a variety of emotions, one of which is an angry face. If a number of angry faces are attached to your Facebook updates and photos, your business isn’t in a good space.
Assessment
When you want to revamp the way that you use social media signals, the first step is to assess where you currently stand. With all of the tools available on the internet, conducting a thorough assessment can seem overwhelming and even impossible. In other words, you might wonder how you could possibly go through all of your social media accounts and reviews sites to reach a significant conclusion. Working with experts at eSasson Studios can help you to determine where your business stands in terms of social media signals and what specific steps you must take.
Review Low Numbers
One approach that you can use to start a self-assessment is to look at places where your numbers are low. For example, you might not have many likes on the main page of your business. You can work on building up your local SEO by asking relatives and friends to like the page. However, you can also increase your chances of success by generating likes from serious customers. Take a look at your social media pages. If you don’t post content on them frequently or if you don’t have crisp images of what your business has to offer, you also then have at least part of the answer as to why people are not liking your photos, updates and pages. An active social media presence is necessary if you want to enhance your social media signals. Also, take a look at the sites where people in the neighborhood go to review businesses. Make sure your company is on there. Then, encourage customers to write reviews. You might want to follow up with thank-you emails that include links to the review sites, or you can post signs in the store to let clients know that they can voice their opinions online.
Review Negative Signals
As you’re going through your social media accounts and review sites associated with your business, you might start to notice negative signals too. What you should do here is a search for the common denominator. While you may discover that some of the negative signals vary in content, you’re likely to find at least some repeated issues as well. For example, you may discover that a decent portion of the negative signals has to do with low response times through social media and email. Then, you can work to improve these specific problems with your business. In addition to working toward better social signals, you are also demonstrating to customers that you care about improving the business to better serve them.
Social media signals clearly play an important role in your business and in attracting local customers. As you are evaluating the signals, you are likely to learn more about your company and the public’s perception of it. Through this investigation, you can begin to create more compelling content and a stronger business overall.
