The Role of Social Media in Link-Building Strategies

Intro

Link-building is essential for every SEO strategy. The more quality backlinks a website has, the higher the search engine ranking it receives.

Unfortunately, most link builders tend to overlook the role of social media in link-building strategies. Although there is no direct link between social media and SEO, social media can help you grow meaningful relationships with thought leaders and audiences. So, it can indirectly help you secure more high-quality backlinks for SEO.

In this article, you’ll learn about social media link-building strategies and best practices.

Understanding Link-Building in SEO

Link-building is a strategy where you work to get other websites to link back to pages on your site. In SEO, these links are called backlinks.

Search engines consider sites with quality backlinks as authoritative. Each backlink is seen as a vote of confidence for your content. As a result, sites with quality backlinks are rewarded with high rankings on SERPs. In turn, they get more search traffic.

There are several ways to build backlinks.

• Broken link-building - Provide an alternative link (your link) to the site owner to replace a dead link on their site.
• Guest blogging - Create valuable content for another site in exchange for a backlink.
• Link inserts - Get a backlink to your site included in an existing piece of content on another website.
• Skyscraper technique - Create and promote a better resource to site owners than the one they’re currently linking to.
• Public relations - Share a story about your brand for other websites (mostly news sites) to cover.

Let’s now explore social media link-building to see how social platforms can boost your link-building efforts.

Role of Social Media in Link-Building

Social media link-building means using social media to acquire backlinks for your website. As mentioned earlier, it is tricky to get someone to link to your site if they don’t know you or your business. This means that you need to build connections to incentivize site owners to link to you. Social media can help you with that.

Through social media platforms, you can hold real conversations with people in your field. You also get to add value to others by commenting and sharing new knowledge. This is really helpful when you’re trying to build your brand using social media.

Though social media links and social shares do not directly impact your SEO ranking, it supports your link-building campaigns in several ways:

1. Content promotion
2. Relationship-building
3. Outreach

We’ll talk more about each of these three things in the next section.

Strategies for Social Media Link-Building

For your link-building efforts to be successful, part of your content marketing strategy should be creating link-worthy content. This means generating creative content that is catchy, informative, surprising, and sharable. You want your website owners and thought leaders in your niche to want to link to your content in the first place.

Here’s an example of link-worthy website content. It’s a diagram of top design tools which users can also interact with. It doesn’t just provide valuable data. It also engages users:

Of course, great pieces as part of your retail or SaaS content production isn’t enough. You need to promote your content on social media as well. Content promotion will allow you to catch the attention of industry leaders and website owners.

Don’t just post your website content link on social media. Perform hashtag research as well. If you use popular and relevant hashtags for your promoted content, you increase your chances of relevant social media users discovering your content when they make a query on the social platform.

Performing hashtag research isn’t as hard as it sounds. All you need to do is type a keyword into your social media platform of choice. You’d typically get a list of the most popular hashtags people use. Another way is to use hashtag tools. Hashtagify, for instance, tells you how popular a hashtag is:

You can use social media to build relationships with people who are more likely to link to your website content, too. The best way to do this is to engage with your target audience as well. When someone comments about how great your social media post is, a simple thank you can go a long way.

Don’t forget to take advantage of the interactive features of social media platforms. You can like your prospects’ own content on Facebook, retweet their blog post on Twitter, or share their video on Instagram. These won’t only help you build relationships with link prospects. They will also help you get Instagram thread followers, and generate Facebook likes and retweets from other people who also found that reposted content interesting.

Another way you can build relationships is by joining social media communities. With Facebook and LinkedIn groups, for instance, you can gain access to people running authoritative sites that can link to your site content. Be active members of these groups. Provide value by contributing to the discussions in the group to show your brand authority. You can even promote your website content in these groups as well.

You can also use social media to perform your outreach for link-building opportunities.

For instance, you can send webmasters DMs asking them for possible guest post opportunities. This becomes even more effective if you’ve already started building your relationships with those webmasters. In your DM, you may reference their post you promoted on your social media platform, for example. So, if you ask them for a favor, like a guest post opportunity, they might just return the favor.

Of course for your outreach to work, you have to make sure your social media platform is professional-looking. Just think about it. You yourself will probably ignore a Facebook message coming from someone who has no Facebook profile image and with an incomplete profile.

So, optimize your social media profiles so the link prospects you message will conclude you’re a legitimate business. Have a professional profile picture and a detailed bio that’s free from grammatical issues and spelling mistakes. Check out Hubspot’s Instagram profile:

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To increase the chances of prospects thinking you’re the real deal, make sure your social platforms reflect the same branding as your website. Just to give you an idea, here’s a screenshot of Hubspot’s homepage:

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Notice the consistency in the use of the logo and color palette across Hubspot’s two marketing platforms?

That’s not to say your outreach should be conducted solely on social media. If that doesn’t work, you can use other marketing platforms, like email, to reach out to link prospects, too.

Measuring and Evaluating Social Media Link-Building Success

Let’s say you’ve generated links using social media. Great! But your job doesn’t end there. You need to measure the effectiveness of your campaign based on the backlinks you generated.

For this, you just have to go back to the goals and objectives you should have set prior to the start of your link-building campaign using social media. How many backlinks did you aim to gain? What were the specific websites you wanted to get backlinks from as part of your backlink strategy?

Then use tools like Rank Tracker to find your backlink and referral sources after the campaign. Did you meet the goals and objectives you set out to achieve in the first place? If you did, then your link-building campaign using social media worked. You should continue what you’re doing on social media for continued link-building success.

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If you didn’t, then see what you’re doing wrong. Maybe you’re not promoting your content as effectively? Or maybe you’re not as active in your social media communities? Then make the necessary adjustments.

Case Studies of Successful Social Media Link-Building Strategies

There are many case studies of businesses successfully using social media for link-building.

For example, a non-profit organization, Invisible Children, created a video about the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. The video went viral on social media, generating 35 million views.

As a result, even the international press like BBC and The Guardian took up the story. As they wrote their articles, they also linked to the video on the nonprofit’s website. So, the site gained a lot of high-quality backlinks, boosting its search rankings in the process.

Adventurous Kate represents another successful use of social media for link-building. She wrote a blog post about how she got shipwrecked on a boating trip in Indonesia. She shared the blog on social media and it became viral content.

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Many authoritative travel sites like Travelers Point and Hostel Bookers picked up the story and linked to her blog post. The result? Improved SEO as well.

These two case studies show the indirect link between social media signals and quality backlinks. Use social media to your advantage, and you can get these results, too.

Conclusion

To wrap up, we’ve talked about the role that social media plays in building links. We’ve also seen the strategies for link-building using social media and how to measure its success.

The best practices and case studies highlighted above should help you come up with a great strategy for generating high-quality links. Use social media for content promotion, building relationships, and for outreach.

You’ll see excellent results.