Quick links
As we have discussed in previous posts, link building is moving away from traditional methods and towards social media sharing. The idea behind this is that social shares and links to your site are earned as you have created interesting or popular content that consumers are naturally interested in.
In order to develop your inbound link profile, you need to expand the amount of people that your unique content can reach. Twitter is one of the most influential social media platforms so we have put together our top tips for building your Twitter following.
1. Make Your Profile Stand Out
If you want people to take you seriously then you need to have a professional looking profile. Keep your username short, memorable and relevant; you don’t want to have a load of underscores or hyphens that will make it look messy. No-one wants to have to type out a long username like @polaris_example_username every time they mention or contact you.
Be consistent with your tweets; try to spend a certain amount of time every day posting and replying to tweets. You don’t want to bombard followers with hundreds of tweets in a day but you also don’t want to drop off the face of the earth when you have comments awaiting a response.
2. Get Yourself Noticed
Ultimately, you want to get yourself noticed and followed by influential people in your industry. For example, if you are in the media business then you may theoretically want to get yourself noticed by people like Richard Branson. Obviously, you need to be realistic about who you want to target; Richard Branson probably gets thousands of tweets a day so you would really have to pull something special out of the bag to get him to notice and follow you!
What you can do, however, is try to get mentioned by people that you know Richard Branson follows. If your unique content is consistently being re-tweeted by people he follows; your name will regularly appear on his timeline. Needless to say, your content needs to be of a good quality and have useful, relevant facts so that people actually want to share it. Unfortunately, people probably aren’t going to share that you’re “having a great day! #smileyface”. Also, if you see that someone in your industry has asked a question then, if you can, answer it. Show that you know what you’re talking about and get a dialogue started; this is one of the quickest ways to get yourself remembered.
Lastly, on this point; make sure you utilise hash tags wisely. If you are at an industry event; or if there is a major event happening, then tweet about it using a hash tag. Say, for example, that you are at a media event; let’s call it ‘Example Media Event’, and there are loads of different company stands. You want people to come to your stand and you know that people have been tweeting about the event previously using the hash tag #examplemediaevent. You could send a tweet such as “come and visit our stand #examplemediaevent”. Everyone who has been following the trend #examplemediaevent will then see your Tweet and may come and visit your stand. (Hint: Your tweet would obviously need to be much more compelling than the example I just gave!)
3. Use Other Social Media Platforms
If you have hundreds of ‘likers’ on Facebook, but only a handful of followers on Twitter then why not ask your Facebook fans to follow you on Twitter also. Write a simple status update with a link to your Twitter page and it couldn’t be simpler for them to just click through. You could also offer some kind of incentive, such as, when you hit a certain amount of followers; you will have some kind of prize draw. You can also do the same for your linkedIn contacts and people you have in your email address book. The more followers you have, the more potential you have to reach an even wider audience.
Setting up your social media profiles can take time but once they’re done, all you need to do is spend a bit of time every day posting and responding to comments. If you see something interesting that someone else has written then re-tweet it; they are much more likely to return the favour!
Social media is the way forward in terms of link building, so don’t ignore it; at Polaris, we now offer social media as part of our ethical SEO strategy so contact us today to find out how we can help you!
