Most organizations start their social media campaigns by imitating those who have had success and following the basics of using social media for business.  Usually this includes generating new leads, improved customer service, and growing brand awareness/loyalty.  When doing this you develop your business objectives and  metrics and the begin to measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign.  With all of the time and money that is required to start and monitor a social media campaign you should maximize the return by expanding your goals and use of social media.  You can use your social media initiative to improve your Search Engine Optimization by adding new links which will maximize  the ROI of both your SEO and social media campaign.

While the links on your social media profile and the links in your social media messages are “no-followed”, meaning they won’t pass any link juice to your website there are other ways to utilize social media for SEO.  Social media is one of the most powerful ways to get your information in front of others who want to read it.  By finding and connecting with users on the social web you will be able to grow the reach of your content while at the same time grow the number of links to your site.

The only way to make social media work as a link building tool is to gain trust in your social network.  You won’t have any success if you create social profiles at 10 networks and send out messages like “Read my blog on widgets and link to it, trust me its good”.  The first problem is that you won’t have a network to hear your message and the second problem is that if any one does hear your message they won’t trust you.  What you need to keep in mind when using social media for SEO  is that having a social network of 10 trusting and knowledgeable followers is far more important than having 10,000 followers that don’t listen to your messages and don’t trust you.

Here is the cliff notes version of creating a social network that will positively influence your SEO Campaign:

• Find the social networks where potential influencers are active.  There is no point in becoming heavily involved in a social network that will not provide the high quality links that you need to make SEO successful.
• After finding the networks that hold the most promise you now have to become an active participant.  Listen to the conversations taking place on the network, starting following or friending influencers, and learn what topics the influencers are interested in.
• After you know the style and substance of your social network your next step in becoming a participant in the conversation.  Start to comment on others messages and see where their content is coming from, begin to note which of your social network contacts have active blogs.
• Make a list of the blogs you have access to through your social networks and become an active participant on those blogs.

After becoming a trusted community member of your social network you can then begin to see if there has been any SEO gains.  Begin monitoring your links to see if any of the blogs or other web properties that belong to your social network are linking to you.  If you are not seeing the links then you have to take the initiative to ask for the link.  If you don’t feel comfortable doing this then you haven’t developed enough trust.  Simply email your social network contacts with blogs and ask for a blog roll link or a link to a new post you just published.

You can continue this process on an ongoing basis as you develop new content that can be linked to and as you continue to grow your social network contacts base.  By developing these relationships online you will be able to dramatically improve your performance in the search engines.