Social media has an influence on SEO. Many people use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other sites. As such, social media is a good opportunity to connect with new people and potential customers. Beating our competition online, in the social media space, involves developing a social media strategy that sets realistic goals unique to your business.

Going forward to develop an SEO strategy for social media, you should start with the SMART goal. SMART stands for:

• Specific 
• Measuabe
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

You can start with setting specific goals. You should choose the goals like “brand awareness” or “lead generation” instead of  “get attention”.

We can define social media marketing as “Measurability”. Being able to track every post, click, view, and share of social media contact is essentially what makes digital marketing superior to traditional marketing methods. 

Conversion campaigns are used for clicks and sales. Brand awareness campaigns might look for mentions of your business or more specific social engagements.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to measure social media effectiveness but once you have decided what to measure, you must set attainable goals for how much you want to achieve through those measurable. For example, If you have a new business and have just 100 followers, you may set a goal to get 1000 followers within one month. 

Next term is relevant. You need to set the goals that are relevant to your business. For example your goals should be relevant to where your business is right now and what current business objectives are. 

Set timely goals. Set a specific time period to attain the goals. For example, if you have started your digital marketing strategy for Instagram marketing, you can set the goal to get 20,000 followers within 6 months or according to the size of your business. 

Be realistic, using your prior experience as a reliable guide. There are some online tools available to help you develop social media strategies. You can use SEMrush’s social media tracker.

To make an effective strategy you need to know what your competitors are doing. Try to find the techniques and methods they are using to get brand awareness. Social media tracker can help you to inform you of your competitor’s latest campaign efforts.

What is social media tracker?

Add new project

To start analysing your competitor’s social media strategy, let’s go to the Social Media Tracker. You can find it in the left-hand Social Media Toolkit menu.

First of all, you need to create and set up your project by clicking ‘New Social Media Tracker’. Then, you can add a new project by typing in your ‘Project domain’ and ‘Project name’.

The tool allows you to add your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest accounts. It automatically asks for these profile links. You can  add manually the profile links by clicking suggest account. 

After the accounts are connected, you can add your competitors domains. You can add up to 20 different competitors domains who you can track on every social media channel they have. Social media trackers also ask you for the email where it can send the updated reports about your project. 

What are social channels for SEO?

Social channel sections display audience size, activity and engagement of each channel. It gives you the information about where a certain business has a larger audience, where they post more and where they get more engagement. 

What is top content for SEO?

You are also able to see the competitors that have top level content. You can see which competitors have best or worse content than yours. It also suggests what kind of content your audience would rather see and gives you new ideas to create engaging content.  Posts can be sorted by ‘Total Engagement‘ or ‘Engagement Rate‘. ‘Total Engagement’ tells you which post had the biggest overall impact, and ‘Engagement Rate’ tells you which post had the biggest impact relative to our competitor’s audience.

SEO Comparison with competitors

This section displays the comparison of your project with your chosen competitors. Comparison works according to three important terms- Audience, activity and engagement and their changes during a selected time period.  You can customize this graph by adding or removing any social network, and hiding the metrics for a single company by clicking the eye icons on the left-hand side of the graph.

The tracker also allows you to analyze the data about performance of each of your social media channels.

There are four metrics that are particularly useful in analyzing social media strategies:

•  Which posts had the most engagement 
• Which posts had the highest  engagement rate
• Specific types of engagement, like comments, shares/retweets, or likes
• Mentions and top mentioners on Twitter