No matter what kind of campaign you’re designing, it should be your top priority to strategize with SEO in mind. When you are looking at any aspect of Internet marketing and campaigning, you want to be sure to keep your company’s SEO and rankings at the forefront to help guide and direct your strategy.

This 4-component brainstorming advice can really work for a lot of different campaigns: organic campaigns, content development, advertisement, and so on, but here we focus on how this can be used for social campaigns to give a clearer illustration, of course keeping SEO in mind all along the way.

First Up: SEO & Social Campaigns Working Together

As a little background information, it’s important to understand how SEO and social campaigns can compliment one another. The reason focusing on social campaigns out of the many, many marketing campaigns you can host (virtually) is successful is because it really has become one of the “buzzwords” in the marketing world. Social media for business has taken on a new level of importance, but how can SEO and social media work together? It is all too easy to focus on social marketing platforms and forget all of the benefits your actions can have for your SEO, but according to research by acronym.com there are five ways that you can use social media campaigns to boost your SEO:

  1. Use social media pages with high-ranking potential. Many of these sites have high domain potential and ranking authority. This can allow your profile to rank for targeted keywords.
  2. Direct traffic and indirect links through your content/profile for SEO. Popular posts such as blog articles or videos can provide increased indirect links and views of your content.
  3. Social factors are involved in search engine algorithms. This is something that is definitely going to increase in importance over time. While Google, Yahoo, and Bing mainly use forms of advanced link and keyword analysis to determine the rankings, Google has already introduced various social search features such as SearchWiki, SideWiki, and Social Search.
  4. Recent integration into the search results. With the increase of social media use, Google and Bing have started to incorporate social status updates and content into search results.
  5. Direct link sources help with indexing. Some social media sites provide direct SEO links. As a consequence, social media sites are frequently crawled by search engines and any links on them help the search bots find and index new pages quickly.

Now onto brainstorming for your own campaigns.

#1 Know What to Write

Reading through the first section, it is clear that keywords are an essential feature to ranking. When you are writing and developing your posts on social media platforms, keep this in mind. With features that are now integrating social media posts into search rankings, as you brainstorm ideas for your campaign, focus on the keywords that you want to use. This will not only benefit your SEO, but also make sure you are reaching an audience beyond your followers already connected with you on social media.

In the screenshot below, you can see the “keyword search” feature on Facebook. This allows users to search for topics and content that they are interested in. You want to be sure that you are a result for people looking for ideas surrounding your campaign. Below is a screenshot from Wordstream that shows just that:

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#2 Know When to Publish

Timing is always of the essence. When you are building your campaign you want to think about every aspect of timing you can, from the time of year you are launching it to the time of day you are posting it. The component of time often dictates how you will launch your campaign in the first place.

Let’s say you work in the health and fitness industry. You may want to launch a social campaign leading up to and following the “New Year”, this is because a lot of people have health goals at the forefront and they want to look for brands that will support them in this endeavor. You may also want to keep time of day for campaign posts in mind. Morning posts may inspire individuals who want to begin their day with a healthy start, and evening posts may help to get people on the right track the following morning.

Knowing how to time your posts and publish with consideration of timing will help you to get more attention, more likes, more shares, which will in-turn help your SEO. AdEspresso offered up this great example from GMC Live Well:

fb-example

#3 Research Your Audience

Do not make the mistake of launching into a campaign without researching your audience. The most effective social media campaigns keep in mind the audience they are trying to reach. As you are in the initial stages of campaign development ask, “who is going to be the most interested?”

While you certainly want to reach as many people as possible, you also want to keep in mind that not every campaign you start on social media will be effective or even important to all of your followers. Personalizing to the group you want to target may help with this. These personalization efforts also help with things like keywords, link building, and gaining popularity and search results—which are all essential when you are keeping your SEO at the forefront of a campaign.

#4 How to Brainstorm an Idea that Works

With social marketing and campaigns being so important to business success, it is essential to plan for SEO success at the same time. To brainstorm an idea that works, I suggest you ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who am I trying to target?
  • What are the goals of the campaign?
  • What are the associated keywords?
  • How can this post be promoted as much as possible by my existing followers?
  • What time of year will this campaign be launched?
  • What time of day will I promote the posts I have developed?
  • What are the demographics of my target audience? Of my larger audience of followers?
  • How can the brand benefit from this campaign?

These questions can help you start to acknowledge the link between social media campaigns and SEO. As I mentioned earlier, this four-component brainstorming exercise is not exclusive to social media campaigns, but I think the examples illustrate why the two fit so well together and how your SEO can really benefit.

Do you have experience with brainstorming and launching a campaign? Did you remember to consider these SEO angles in the process? Let us know in the comments section below—we would love to hear your story!