This Guest Post by Cijo Abraham Mani is a Part of Guest Blogging Contest, for complete details please check Guest Blogging Contest pageThere have been lot of speculations about social media and social networking. A lot of people though “Social Media is a fad”. The people who though social media as a fad are people who are really scared to face the reality. Social Media is a reality and everyone has to accept it. The instant growth of social media was due to its transparent nature and knowledge sharing. I have been huge supporter of social media from the
beginning. Social Media helps us to stay updated with what is happening across each industry. If you are a travel industry professional then you can easily stay updated with the travel industry news through social media. The key point in using social media service in business is that you need to promote your brand indirectly. No one likes to listen to a sales message for long. You followers and friends do like to share interesting content. Give what your followers want and you will be successful in generating an engaging community. You can’t succeed overnight in Social Media. Social Media is not a rocket science but you need to understand how social media can deliver return on investments. The return on investment from social media is not just mere sales. Social Media builds a stronger community for a brand and this makes more trust among its customers and their is a high chance that members of the community start to buy your product or use your service. The satisfied social media customers will surely recommend your product or service to their friends and there is a high chance that they too will buy your product or service.
Search Engines have added a lot of social search features to their search results and they kept on implement new ways to include social results into search. Both Google and Bing has now revealed that they are using social signals as one signal among the many signals that decide the SERP of any website. It is said both Google and Bing revealed this to Danny Sullivan. Both the Search Engine giants had similar responses. I have personal seen a lot of strong signs that social media signals were actually counted. I have been lucky to have used this signal well ahead of other SEO’s and Online Marketing Professional. The major signal I saw was that “I saw some social media links started to be shown as backlink in Google Webmaster Tool”. This was a strong sign and I knew that social media signals are actually counted. The website www.mypolitician.com.au got a huge boost in search engine due to its social media popularity in-spite of being a new website. The website started to get higher SERP’s for most of its short tail as well as long tail keywords. I have also shared my view about social media backlinks through my blogposts in my personal blog. Now it is time to discuss how social media signals are taken. Both search engines do consider author authority, how many times the information or post is being shared and how many influential people promote the information. Tweets as well as facebook fan posts are considered by Google and Bing. Soon there will be a social rank (just like page rank) that will be associated with each individual and brand that use social media. If your company or brand has not started using social media it is time that you should give it a go.