{"id":20020,"date":"2019-07-25T23:53:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-25T23:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/?p=20020"},"modified":"2019-07-30T20:38:03","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T20:38:03","slug":"social-media-marketing-learnings-mozcon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/blog\/social-media-marketing-learnings-mozcon\/","title":{"rendered":"What Social Media Marketers Can Learn From MozCon 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

What can SEO do for your social media strategy? Make it better.<\/p>\n

MozCon 2019, an SEO conference which takes place in Seattle every July, was filled with speakers and attendees from all over the world focusing on the importance of SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for your organic traffic, brand recognition, and conversion rates. Check out MozCon\u2019s day-by-day breakdowns<\/a> if you\u2019re ready for a whirlwind of live tweets, or read below some standouts from the conference as they relate to social media.<\/p>\n

I was joining in this conversation wearing multiple hats: part of my Digital Marketing role means I\u2019m an SEO always looking to drive up my metrics in Google Analytics, and I\u2019m also an in-house marketer for a social media analytics tool. Since we live and breathe social media metrics at Rival IQ we care a lot about what\u2019s working for our customers, the latest marketing trends, and algorithm updates.<\/p>\n

My frame of mind wasn\u2019t solely in the \u201cSEO first and forever\u201d camp at last week\u2019s MozCon like the cheering data scientists around me. But luckily, the philosophy behind SEO is widely applicable to any type of digital marketing, social media in particular.<\/p>\n

Social media wins can help your SEO<\/h2>\n

Before we dive into the glories of SEO as a subset of digital marketing, it\u2019s important to shout out the power of social media as it relates to SEO. SEOs can forget that social sharing gets more eyes, links, and engagement to your content and website, which can in turn up your SEO value (including backlinks and traffic) significantly.<\/p>\n

Social media marketing is sometimes treated as the \u201clittle brother\u201d in digital marketing, often an afterthought or assigned to the rotating class of interns, so it doesn\u2019t always get the technical treatment SEO is known for. Ideally, following these latest SEO \u201crules\u201d for your content on social media will bring in the organic traffic gains across the board.<\/p>\n

Expertise matters to the algorithms<\/h2>\n

Google\u2019s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) update last August<\/a> left marketers reeling from ranking drops, but the intention behind the mega search mogul\u2019s move was to protect searchers from bad information that happens to have good SEO. Google\u2019s algorithm doesn\u2019t like spammy sites with fake backlinks because they make the trust in the content appear higher regardless of quality. Marketing consultant Marie Haynes<\/b><\/a> had an excellent and actionable piece of advice on the subject:<\/p>\n

\n Marie insists: \n<\/strong>An author bio seriously ups your content\u2019s E-A-T.\u00a0<\/i><\/div>\n\n\n

Adding an author bio to an article tells the reader (and Google) the article can be trusted because it was written by an expert. If your article doesn\u2019t contain expert-level advice, it probably doesn\u2019t deserve to rank #1.<\/p>\n

This same strategy can be applied to social media. For example, brands frequently struggle with the \u201cvoice\u201d of their company on LinkedIn. Some companies use individuals as brand advocates, like a CEO, while others use the company page as the source of authority on their brand. Most LinkedIn experts agree that LinkedIn is a people-to-people platform<\/a> and content there generally performs better from an individual than from a company page. That\u2019s not to say that some brand pages aren\u2019t killin\u2019 it on LinkedIn (Bumble<\/a> and Social Chain<\/a> to name two), but it\u2019s one place where authorship stands out.<\/p>\n

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With 29,781 followers on LinkedIn, Social Chain\u2019s 15k+ video views are impressive for a brand page.<\/p><\/div>\n

Your audience is tired of keyword-driven content<\/h2>\n

Ross Simmonds<\/a> of Foundation Marketing<\/a> asked marketers to do more with content than boring listicles one-upping the old SERP. At MozCon, he provided lots of great ideas for fresher content in his full slide presentation<\/a>, and a few really jumped out at me.<\/p>\n

1. Using Quora Ads Manager<\/a><\/strong> as a topic generation tool.<\/p>\n

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Now as marketers, we know that Q&A forums like Quora can be a great place to get ideas, or swipe some interesting anecdotes (we\u2019re looking at you, Buzzfeed<\/a>). But Ross takes this a step further by illustrating that keywords in Quora\u2019s ad platform include top questions with average weekly view data. That\u2019s some valuable data to use in your content strategy when you\u2019re choosing topics and headlines.<\/p>\n

2. Another data-backed example Ross outlined is that links are more prevalent on Reddit than on any other social platform<\/strong>. Knowing this channel-specific use case should be part of each of your social strategy as well as SEO. Find what works everywhere you\u2019re posting advertising and use it to determine what you\u2019re sharing on that platform.<\/p>\n

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Throughout his presentation, Ross underlined the need for channel-user fit, which means sussing out the behavior of your audience on a particular platform, understanding what they want, and giving it to them.<\/p>\n

Ross\u2019 protip for Reddit is to search subreddits for a competitor\u2019s site name or URL so that you can see what\u2019s getting buzz in the forum. Off Reddit, you can check your Rival IQ landscape for sites or URLs to see what your competition is sharing with our Posted URLs feature<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reactive Content is Valuable on Social Media<\/h2>\n

Aira\u2019s Head of PR and Content Shannon McGurik<\/b><\/a> perfectly summarized why her title is so important for SEO.\u00a0 Varied content is important to successful SEO strategy that can survive algorithm updates and trending topics alike. McGruick separates journalism-style content into three buckets.<\/p>\n

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Tailoring your content and PR pitches towards these three types of writing will cover all your bases when it comes to SEO.<\/p><\/div>\n

1. Planned Content:<\/strong> Content on your calendar, including product updates, strategized articles based on keyword research, rewrites of older content, etc.<\/p>\n