Social media is an amazing and proven way to grow an online brand, and all it takes is creativity, passion, and consistency to proceed in the right direction. If you have not yet entered the social media, take a moment to prepare a plan to create your profile and start building your online community.

Regardless of the niche, your business belongs to; social media should be an essential part of your marketing strategy. Every business should have social media presence and a minimum marketing plan in place, and you should be engaging your audience at least once a week.

if you’re still thinking about getting started or taking social media seriously, take a moment and consider these points:

Your Competition is Already Social

Your competitors are already active on social media. That means your potential social media traffic and conversions are being diverted to their business and website, thus growing their business.

The Earlier You Start, the Quicker You Get the Benefits

Now you know that social media is all about relationship building, and it grows as your followers tell their friends, and those friends tell their friends, and so on. The earlier you start, you’ll be able to start growing that audience quickly.

You Don’t Lose Anything

Basically, you are not going to lose anything by getting started in social media. Both the amount of time and money you spend to create your profiles and start posting is usually minimal, considering other marketing channels.

Today, there’s little doubt among marketers that SEO and social media are two must-have components of any effective digital marketing strategy. After all, SEO is arguably the founding-father-tactic of digital marketing, and social media is theplace on the web where our audiences gather, share and engage every day.

However, regardless of whether social signals are used as a ranking factor—when done right—social media can most definitely enhance your  SEO efforts. How? Below I share three reasons why, as well as some tips to make your social content more SEO friendly.

Social media can lead to quality backlinks.

While ranking science on backlinks has evolved over the years, the number of quality backlinks a website has is still an important ranking factor for search engines. As a result, link building or link earning is still a widely-used tactic among marketers—and your social media pages can be the perfect staging ground for enticing links.

The logic here is pretty simple. Social media marketing is all about sharing your best of the best content, and fostering engagement around that content. The more engaging your content, the more people will share, and the more opportunities people will have to find and link to your content.

Social media increases the visibility of  content

Social media pages give your website and blog content another place to live and encourage discussion. And while your pages can be so much more than a promotional platform, one of the greatest social media benefits is the potential reach your content could get.

Of course, I asked my TopRank Marketing comrade Steve Slater, Digital Advertising & SEO Manager, to weigh in here, too. Here’s what he had to say.

“Whether or not social shares and metrics have an impact on ranking without them you are 100% at the mercy of Google organic,” he said. “Without social or paid or any promotional efforts, you are basically hitting publish and hoping for the best. You’re hoping that your content will just ‘go viral and take off.’ So, I think the question is not really, do social signals impact rankings? But rather, is anyone going to see this if I don’t promote it?”

Social media helps build brand awareness

Your social media pages add another digital space for your target audience to find you and engage with you, allowing you to build up your audience and your brand. Of course, when this happens people will more easily recognize you in search and be more inclined to click. In addition, that brand awareness you’ve built on social could mean more branded organic search traffic coming to your site or your other social pages (since those often rank in branded searches, too).

Quick Tips to Intertwine Social & SEO

While social media can add a nice little boost to your SEO efforts, the reverse—of course—is also true. Here are a couple quick tips for marrying social content and SEO.

• Optimize your posts and profiles. Social media platforms are search engines. So, make sure craft your posts with both users and SEO in mind. In addition, optimize your social profiles with the same logic.
• Leverage hashtags in the right way. Especially when it comes to Twitter and Instagram, hashtags are how people find the content they’re looking for; hashtags are their search queries. Research hashtag best practices for each platform to understand if and how to use them. In addition, make sure you understand what hashtags actually mean, so you can use them in the appropriate way for each platform. Use the native search box within social platforms, as well as tools such as Hashtagify.me or Hashtags.org.
• Draft optimized social messages when you’re crafting new content. Any content you’re creating for your website or blog should have an SEO component. As you’re creating this content, create several optimized social posts to go along with it. This will help you create relevant messages that can be found in native searches.
• Use mentioning and tagging to build more relevance—and signal influencers. Mentioning and tagging other pages and users in your content is one of the best ways to amplify your posts. Not only do those you tag and mention get notified when you do so, but they’ll be more compelled to engage on your post or share your post with their audience. And as mentioned above, the more shares and engagement, the better the reach and the more potential for driving quality traffic and backlinks.