Why social media content should live on-site not just on Facebook & Instagram

Brands and agencies spend countless hours creating beautifully crafted social media posts (some not so beautiful) for Facebook & Instagram, but are missing a vital component of digital marketing in the process.

Largely the process adopted by brands and agencies is as follows:

• Agency and client agree on some content pillars (themes or buckets that they will speak about on social)
• The agency or client creates a content calendar for the month
• Then everyone jumps straight into designing posts and imagery or video that is aesthetically pleasing
• The post gets approved and boom we hit the publish button

So what is wrong with this you ask?

Well, ideally a brand wants a user to take a journey out of the Facebook environment onto their own assets, in most cases, their website that they spent big bucks, time and effort producing. And where customers can turn into leads or revenue.

So why not turn social media content on its head?

Rather focus on producing content with a purpose that looks great on your own website first. Think of the destination as the source of the social creative, not the other way round.

This can have a massive benefit in increasing your websites subject authority (organic search) and should provide content that has genuine utility to a user.

A bit of research using tools like https://answerthepublic.com can surface lots of subjects that your customer search for in relation to your products and services. For example, let’s say you sell face cream to help with dry skin, if you go to answer the public and see what search queries (or rather questions) people are looking for, in this case, it looks something like this:

So immediately we have surfaced hundreds of question related searches against the topic, which can be used as content ideas. Essentially you can look to “answer the public” with genuine longer form content.

Once that content is created, make it a page with beautiful imagery that lives on your website.

Ideally in some form of knowledge base or blog style section that can be neatly grouped into neat topic clusters.

Top Clusters

As an example on the Algorithm site, we structure our blog around topics:

• SEO
• Performance Marketing
• Digital Marketing

Each of these is a section so the URL becomes:

• https://www.algorithm.agency/blog/seo
• https://www.algorithm.agency/blog/performance-marketing
• https://www.algorithm.agency/blog/digital-marketing

Then you can start thinking about the social creative and the post that links to this content.

Social Signals for SEO

Although the Google algorithm for natural search rankings comprises of many factors, one of those is still related to social signals like clicks, likes, shares for your social content. The added benefit of approaching social media the other way round is that you also send some signals to Google that your content is being consumed and has therefore got “some authority”. This should help the pace at which Google ranks your new site content.

Social and Organic Search Strategy

If you would like to know more about how your social content can be used to help grow your websites natural authority, contact us and we will arrange for an SEO & Digital Marketing specialist to give you a call.