How to SEO Your Branded Social Media Profiles: “Article” Writing and Distribution

When your company first gets onto the social media scene, the initial step is to create a pile of banded social media profiles: your company’s page on Facebook, your company’s Twitter feed, your company’s profile on LinkedIn, and so on and so forth ad nauseum. Every company with an interest in social media gets that far. And then, suddenly, they diverge rapidly in terms of how they treat the profiles they’ve created.

We’re not even talking about those social media disasters like #mcstories or the many employees who have tweeted (twaat?) personal messages on the company account and gotten themselves and their corporation in a boatload of trouble — we’re talking a much more fundamental confusion about what their social accounts are even for.

The answer, to cut to the chase, is this: your social media accounts are for posting new content, allowing other people to comment on it, and responding to their comments. Now, if you’re using anything like a modern organic SEO company, you’re probably hearing them talk about “Content marketing”, which naturally involves creating a bunch of content. (If not, you should be — content marketing is the best SEO available at the moment. But that’s a different article.)

That content, wherever you decide to put it up (blog, article directory, landing page, whatever your article writing and distribution team decides it belongs), should also get linked to by all of your social media profiles. The effects are several:

• Your content gets a slight ranking boost from the incoming links.
• Your content gets more readers as people click through your links and see it.
• You get feedback on your content in the form of people replying on the social media about what you wrote.
• Your content gets more readers as the people who saw it during the second step share it with their friends.
• You have the opportunity to drive the discussion by replying to the social media commentary.

Now, here’s the trick this whole article is about — most article directories (and all blogs and other places you could put your content up) will allow you multiple outgoing links from your article. The first clearly needs to be to your landing page — but a subtle second link out to one of your profiles will act as SEO in the other direction as well, boosting your profiles’ ability to get seen on more searches going forward. As more and more of your content gets posted, the social profiles get boosted, raising the whole level of the game with each passing month.