Please @ me : Why boosting your mentions is a critical part of your social media strategy

Brand mentions can have a profound effect on your online marketing success. Search Engine Optimization isn’t just about getting backlinks from authoritative websites — customer engagement in the form of mentions improves your site’s authority, ranking, and trust level.

If you’re investing in creating content, generating backlinks, guest posting, and optimizing your online reputation, you’ll also need to engage your customers. Running an effective social media campaign isn’t something that should be left to the office intern. Social media is serious business and can have a profound effect on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Mentions matter

Mentions aren’t links; they’re more like citations. In the parlance of Twitter, it’s when a customer includes your Twitter handle as an @ link in a post. It’s the equivalent of someone giving you a shout-out in a crowd.

One measure used to assess your company’s online authority, ranking, and trust level is through implied links. Every time another user, business, or account references your account, or @ your brand name, Google registers that as an implied endorsement of your brand worthiness.

As digital marketing evolves, you need to boost the number of times your brand is talked about online. Mentions build brand awareness, engage your customers, and will net you implied links.

Mentions raise brand awareness

The most straightforward reason to boost your mentions is sheer visibility. The whole point of investing in content is to boost your brand awareness. The more people talk about and comment on your brand name online, the higher traffic your site will get, which will ideally result in higher sales.

One of the key ways a business can increase brand awareness is getting mentioned on blogs. In each industry, there are influencers with engaged, loyal followers who trust their advice — these are the people to connect you to their followers. After identifying who the industry influencers are in your market, encourage them to use your product or service and write about their experience.

A recent example of a brand mention resulting in a huge sales bump was when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted out her lipstick brand and color while campaigning for the NY Congressional democratic primary. It resulted in multiple news stories, mentions, and ended with the lip color selling out online.

The value of getting mentioned in a prominent influencer blog isn’t solely the link, it’s also the marketing exposure with a positive message and an endorsement.

Engagement raises mentions

Social media is, at its core, social. These are two-way communication channels where businesses can have quality interactions with customers. Many companies have adopted social media only to push out marketing messaging. The problem is, simply broadcasting your message and expecting it to influence customers doesn’t take advantage of the key benefit of social media. High follower counts don’t mean you have an engaged audience.

If you’ve ever wondered why Wendy’s Twitter account is so vocal about trending issues that aren’t hamburger-related, it’s because they’ve invested in building an engaged group of followers. They did this by only promoting their brand 20% of the time while using the other 80% to entertain, engage, and inform their followers. Companies that neglect the 80/20 rule or expect to see change without investing in listening or community building will be disappointed in the results of their social media efforts.

Increase your mentions to boost your brand

If your goal is to get the most out of your search engine optimization efforts, your goals should include increasing engagement and boosting mentions. As digital marketing evolves, so do the strategies for using social media to impact your brand’s reputation.

The post Please @ me : Why boosting your mentions is a critical part of your social media strategy appeared first on TheMarketingblog.

from TheMarketingblog http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2018/07/please-me-why-boosting-your-mentions-is-a-critical-part-of-your-social-media-strategy/