The concept of “findability” refers to how a business is findable on the web thanks to its presence and activity in social media.
Social media is a great way to promote your business, improve your brand reputation and reach your ideal customers.
To make the most out of the channels you need to build a strong social media strategy that is aligned to your brand image and vision and is coherent with other marketing activities.
The primary objective of your strategy should focus on how to be “social media findable”.
The concept of “findability” is used by the American search engine speaker Heather Lutze, whose passion is to connect businesses with their ideal customers online.
The term refers to how a business is findable on the web thanks to its presence and activity in social media, which are considered as a new form of search engines.
As we know, a business needs to emphasise what makes it unique compared to its competitors. However, in social media the more unique you are, the less findable you are. You must be part of the mainstream conversation.
The first thing you need to do is to improve all your social media profiles. Use a recognisable background image and logo, write a short but meaningful description about your business and lead people back to your website with a trackable link. Your profile is the first thing users will see. While you do that, monitor your web presence in order to know what has been said about you; set Google Alerts up for your company and use tools such as “Mention”, which lets you track social mentions.
Write good content in order to attract new readers and engage your existent followers. Good content that ranks on search engines will bring your web presence at the top of the search results. To find new content ideas you need to read, read... and read. Follow other people’s blogs and social media profiles related to your industry or think about the questions that your ideal customer might have and look for similar questions on the Google search. If that is not enough, “Answer the public” is a search query data visualisation tool that provides content ideas and inspiration. Enter a keyword and a map of keywords will appear on your screen.
Vary the length of your posts and write about different topics: 1/3 of them should focus on the promotion of your brand, 1/3 on the sharing of ideas or stories related to your industry and 1/3 should focus on personal interactions. Post at the right day and at the right time of the day, which are different for each social media platform.
It’s now time to talk about keywords. If you don’t use the right keywords, you won’t rank well on search engines and nobody will find you. To identify the right keywords, you need to think about the traffic, that is the number of people who search for that keyword each day, and about the competition, which refers to the number of other sites trying to rank well for that keyword. Keeping in mind that is quite hard to rank for keywords that are highly competitive, the best way to go is to use long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords have lower search traffic but they are easier to rank for and they still generate a significant amount of traffic. A useful tool to find keywords ideas is “SEMrush”.
Hashtags are also very important as they are used by people to search on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They can be an effective way for people to search for content and it enables website developers to see what is trending on social networking websites. If you are not sure about which hashtags to use around a concept, a tool like “Hashtagify” can definitely help you.
Select the right media, images or videos to add a catchy visual element to your content. Images must be coherent with the content, the keywords and the hashtags used. Use free stock images websites like “Pixabay” to find useful images, or create your own design with “Canva”.
In order to reach a wide and varied audience, you should cross promote your content through all your social media. Start from a blog post, where you have used the right keywords and image, then share it in all your social media. Use the same image, add the right hashtags and provide the link that links back to the original post. In this way, your content will be much more visible.
As managing multiple social media accounts takes a lot of time and resources, you can prioritise the social networks that matters the most for your business and you might use a social media management tool to organise, schedule and post your content. Some examples are “Hootsuite” and “meetedgar”, but there are many others available.
There is a lot more you should know about social media, but you can start from these tips. Never stop posting, liking, commenting and sharing and your social media visibility will take plenty of advantage from that.