5 Ways You Can Use Social Media to Generate Links

Intro

Your business needs a strong online presence to gain exposure and attract customers. That’s why one of your goals should be to rank high on search engine results pages.

The good news is that social media can help you here. There’s no direct link between social media and SEO, but you can use the platform to boost your SEO efforts. When used correctly, social media can help you in your link building strategy for SEO.

In this article, you’ll learn tips for generating links using social media.

But first…

What is Link Building?

By definition, backlinks are hyperlinks on another website that link back to your site; link building is the process of acquiring those backlinks.

To acquire backlinks for SEO, you must ensure your content marketing efforts target sites with high domain authority. Your goal is for them to link to specific web pages on your website.

Why? Search engines such as Google see these links as proof that your site contains high-quality content that satisfies the searcher’s intent. As a result, the more high-quality backlinks your website has, the better your chances of ranking.

This is where social media comes in. Social media can help you generate these links by giving your brand more exposure. There are 4.89 billion users on social networks. The more exposure your brand gets, the more people may go to your site and link to your content.

For the best SEO results, you should complement your link building efforts with other strategies like website optimization. Perform frequent website audits. Ranktracker, for instance, can check your site for issues, and can tell you how to address them.

5 Ways You Can Use Social Media for Link Building

Now that we have the basics out of the way, here are five ways you can use social media for your link building:

1. Reach out to Bloggers and Social Media Influencers

Building relationships with bloggers who have similar audiences can improve your website SEO in the long run. You can get them to carry your backlinks. Whether you’re link building for SaaS companies or retail brands, backlinks from a high domain authority website could improve your search engine rankings and drive organic traffic to your site.

This is where social media can help you. You can use social media to search for these bloggers who might link to you.

All you need to do is insert a relevant keyword in your chosen social platform’s search field. Say, you’re building links for your site that develops bariatric-friendly recipes or sells bariatric-protein supplements for weight loss. Food blogs should be up your alley of link prospects. So, a relevant keyword would be “food blogger” in this case.

You should get a list of social media users who use that keyword with your search. Those social media users should include the bloggers you’re looking to reach out to.

Another way to identify niche bloggers with link prospects on social media is to use tools like Followerwonk. You can use Followerwonk to scrape Twitter bios to find your relevant keywords. You’ll get a list of people–including bloggers–who use these keywords.

Once you’ve found them on social media, you can reach out to them for guest blogging.

You could also reach out to relevant social media influencers for a collaboration instead. For instance, you could ask them to mention your brand in one of their social media posts. You could ask them to include a link to your site.

With this strategy, your brand can gain more exposure before the influencer’s followers that usually run in the thousands or millions. Their followers may include people with websites who could also link to that valuable content on your site.

Of course, for this strategy to be effective, you have to make sure your website content is high-quality. If it isn’t, your tactic will only backfire.

2. Promote Your Content through Social Media Channels

Why not promote your content on your own social media platforms? The rationale is the same: the more exposure your brand gains on social media, the higher the chances someone will link to your website content with their own site.

Remember, though, that different types of content may work better for each social platform. Also, note that different types of people frequent each social channel. Why are these important things to remember? Well, they determine the types of content you’ll promote on that platform.

For instance, it might be easier to promote your thought leadership-style website content on LinkedIn because of the very nature of this platform. Also, professionals who are likely to be interested in your content (and who are, therefore, likely to link to it on their sites) frequent LinkedIn.

You can also take advantage of PPC ads to promote your site content. Here’s an example from Neil Patel:

Monitor how these ads are performing. You can use tools like Polymer Search to identify your best-performing ads. Just bring in your data from Facebook and the tool can automatically generate insights based on this data. With the tool’s AI, you can even identify your top-performing demographics and other patterns in your data the human eye may not see.

You can then tweak your social media ad strategy according to what you find to, ultimately, boost your link building chances.

Don’t just promote your written website articles on your social media platforms.You can also promote other types of content people can link to. Infographics and calculators, for instance, are highly linkable assets.

3. Build and Nurture Relationships with Other Social Media Users

You can use social media for link building in other ways. Why not build relationships with other social media users who aren’t necessarily bloggers or social media influencers? Engage with users who are also in your industry. Again, your goal here is simple: You want to increase your exposure so that when you share your website content on your social channels, they are more likely to link to it through their own websites.

Building a relationship on social media doesn’t have to be that complicated. You could, for instance, search for public social media discussions on a topic in your niche. You could use social media listening tools for this. Then jump in on the conversation. Give your two cents’ worth.

Once you’ve broken the ice, you can start commenting on specific users’ own posts. A simple “I agree with you there” if users gave their stand on something or “Good job!” if they announced a milestone will do.

Once the relationship is there, you can now promote your related blog posts or other site content.

Joining communities on social media also allows you to network with other professionals in your field. These are professionals who are more likely to link to your site content. For example, here’s a Reddit community content marketing professionals can join:

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Also, consider building a loyal community for professionals in your industry to get more eyes on your content.

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Since your websites operate in the same niche, you might even get opportunities for link building. Just make sure you focus on quality and relevancy when deciding which opportunities to entertain.

4. Take Advantage of Hashtags

Many people use hashtags on Twitter and other social media to find conversations that are trending. You can use these hashtags to promote your website content on that platform. This way, you increase your chances of more people seeing this content and linking to it.

You can search for popular hashtags to use by doing a quick search. For instance, if you’re in the marketing niche, you could type in #marketing on LinkedIn:

Then click on the ellipsis and choose Discover New Hashtags.

You can also check out the hashtags social media influencers or your competitors use. Check out the hashtags in viral content, too. Social media listening tools can help you here.

Just make sure you don’t overuse hashtags. Hootsuite, for instance, found that on Instagram, it might even hurt your reach.

Hootsuite recommends only up to five hashtags on social media channels. The specific number of hashtags to use varies per platform.

5. Include Links to Your Website in Your Social Media Profiles

Here’s another way you can use social media for link building: Include links to your website in your social media profiles. Your profiles are typically the first thing people see, so this is a good strategy to get people to your site.

To generate brand exposure on social media, you can place your website links on your social media sites.

On Twitter, you can include your dedicated website field in your bio.

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The same goes for Instagram:

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On LinkedIn, the contact info section allows you to add a website link to enhance professional credibility.

You have to make sure, of course, that when people do click on your link, they’ll find something they’ll want to link to in the first place.

Include a call-to-action for your link in your profile, telling your audience what you want them to do.

Wrap Up

There isn’t a direct link between social media and SEO. But you can use social media for link building as part of your SEO strategy. With the many users on the platform, you can gain many backlink opportunities.

You learned ways you can use social media to generate these backlinks. Now it’s over to you.

For the best results, just remember to assess your social media tactics for SEO every now and then. Based on what you find, make the necessary adjustments to improve and ensure an effective strategy. Good luck!