The Biggest Mistakes that Social Media Marketers Get Wrong About SEO:

 Search engine optimization, or SEO, is probably one of the most misunderstood marketing practices today. From keywords to algorithms, understanding SEO can be a time-consuming and seemingly complex undertaking for most marketers. What keywords work best? How many links should I use? You might have a lot of questions, but the bottom line is this: SEO is about getting your content seen by (the right) people.

To keep your SEO strategy on track, we consulted Hootsuite’s resident SEO expert, Zak Ramdani, on the biggest SEO mistakes marketers make—and how to avoid them.

The 4 biggest SEO mistakes marketers make

1. Misunderstanding the relationship between SEO and social

Although Google suggests social signals do not impact rankings, one can draw correlations between top-performing social content and top performing content on the web with the common denominator being quality content. Content shared on social that receives lots of shares, likes, and comments will likely get similar engagement metrics that lend themselves to Google’s authority signals, and in turn positively impact your rankings.

That said, our SEO expert Ramdani recommends social media managers ensure they aren’t creating social media plans with the exclusive intent of improving rankings. Instead, it should be understood that SEO and social media work together as part of an overall marketing plan to boost engagement and improve reach.

A solid social media presence, combined with valuable content and community building, work together to contribute to increasing brand awareness, website traffic, and improved social customer service.

2. Not sharing content strategically

As the connection between social media and SEO content is key for marketing success, social media managers need to be strategic about the type of content they share.

Instead of sharing only new content, analyze the performance of your past work and recognize what is bringing the most traffic to your site. What kind of content is driving the most traffic? What is getting shared the most? What are the most popular topics and themes your audience engages with? These are all questions social media managers need to consider when deciding what content they will focus on sharing through their online channels.

As Ramdani says, “Pick the consistently winning horse instead of a beat up car that’s never won.” Create a bank of your best-performing evergreen content that you can rotate in your social media content calendar, and share these assets alongside your newer content.

3. Expecting overnight success

SEO is an incredibly effective way of improving traffic to your site, but it’s not a quick fix. Marketers will often expect to deploy strategies and get immediate results. And when they don’t get these results, they abandon the plan.

SEO takes time to pay off, so impatience is one of the biggest roadblocks for marketing managers.

One of the main reasons SEO is a long-term strategy rather than a short-term quick fix, is because of the huge volume of content online. As this Domo infographic shows, the amount of data being shared online every minute is staggering.

Image via: https://www.domo.com/blog/data-never-sleeps-4-0/

You aren’t alone in your industry, and you aren’t the only one pushing out content. Because of this competition, you need to always follow SEO best practices, produce and share quality content, and analyze your results.

Influencers and high-traffic sites put in the work to build authority, and search engines recognize this. Positioning your brand as one to trust (both by search engines and customers) doesn’t happen overnight. Marketers need to post quality content on a consistent basis and ensure it’s gaining valuable backlinks to help establish credibility.

Once social media managers and marketers recognize the time and effort involved in seeing their SEO efforts pay off, they can concentrate on driving their strategy forward.  

4. Not keeping up with SEO advancements

SEO has greatly evolved over the last 10 years, but not all marketers have been able to keep up.

“Many marketers in 2016 don’t get it. They haven’t kept up, or worse, they’re reluctant to running SEO campaigns because they’re attached to tactics of the past,” Ramdani explains.

An example of this is the practice of keyword stuffing. A very popular practice at the beginning of SEO’s evolution, keyword stuffing is when content on a web page is “stuffed” or loaded with keywords. Not only does it look ridiculous and lower the credibility of your content, it can get you hit with a manual or algorithmic suspension, which is hard to work back from.

Marketers need to be aware of updates to search engine algorithms such as Panda (which cracks down on keyword stuffing), Penguin (which penalizes low-quality links), and Hummingbird (which enables a deeper understanding of search intent).

With search results more personalized than ever, marketers need to make the connections between their content and the target audience. Google modifies their rankings to choose the most relevant content based on an individual’s search history, which means that authority, keyword matching, freshness, and engagement become even more important.

This fast-changing technology means marketers and social media managers need to stay on top of developments and adjust their content creation and promotion strategy accordingly.

Complete Emoji Guide for Social Media Marketers

You can’t ignore them any longer—emoji are here to stay. Once confined to adolescent instant messages, these little cartoons now pervade our texts and social media posts. Including emoji in Tweets is shown to increase engagement by 25.4 percent over emoji-free messages, and using them in Facebook posts can increase your number of Likes by 57 percent, and comments and shares by 33 percent.

With those numbers, it’s no surprise that emoji regularly pop up in online marketing campaigns. But, as with any newer digital development, businesses need to know the proper way to incorporate emoji into their branded social media strategies.

To ensure your brand uses emoji in a way that helps instead of hinders your marketing efforts, we’ve put together the following guide. Never make things awkward by using that smirky face incorrectly again.
The emoji marketing guide for social media success
Know the meaning behind the emoji

One of the biggest blunders a brand can make on social media when using emoji is using them incorrectly. Don’t put that eggplant emoji in a company Tweet unless you know exactly what you are doing.

You want to position your brand as an authority and in-the-know. Don’t put your company’s reputation at risk by posting an emoji that doesn’t mean what you think it means. A big fear of many social media marketers is seeming out of touch, so make sure you keep up with the latest emoji developments and meanings.

A great resource is Emojipedia, which serves not only as an emoji dictionary, but also shares the latest developments and news in the emoji world. For example, when iOS 10 came out, Emojipedia published an article that showcased the new emoji and how they will look on other software platforms.

Use emoji for real-time engagement and reactive messaging

While long, pre-composed emoji messages can sometimes miss the mark, a well-timed post can benefit from an emoji… or 10.

Brands started using emoji to show their customers the human side of the business, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t include emoji in a Tweet or Instagram post the same way you would in a text message (when appropriate). And if the occasion calls for it, you can get creative with emoji art, even if the current emoji keyboard doesn’t have a symbol that corresponds with your brand:



Follow
Bud Light
✔@budlight








#4thofJuly
4:19 PM - 4 Jul 2014

140,316140,316 Retweets
106,787106,787 likes




Stay away from cryptic messages

Just because the language of emoji has transcended cultural barriers, you shouldn’t assume all your customers are fluent speakers. While emoji-exclusive copy might make for a fun quiz or an interesting article, it may not be the best idea for a press release. This was the way Chevrolet announced the 2016 Cruze model in #ChevyGoesEmoji campaign:





Follow
Chevrolet
✔@chevrolet


Does Emoji have a ending for @NormMacdonald? #ChevyGoesEmoji
7:00 PM - 23 Jun 2015

4646 Retweets
8080 likes





To their credit, the company did follow up the release with a decoded explanation and a series of YouTube videos titled Emoji Academy, which focused on educating the public on the art of emoji decryption.

While the element of intrigue certainly has worked in some companies’ favor, most people likely won’t take the time to translate something written with only emoji. Unless you can make your coded message part of a larger campaign, stick with shorter messages or equal parts text and emoji pairings.

Remember, social media only works if you’re able to communicate a message clearly. Don’t leave your audience scratching their heads with your emoji use.
Use custom emoji strategically

Marketing campaigns involving custom-made emoji and emoji keyboards have become increasingly popular over the past few years, but only a few of them got attention past initial curiosity about the release. Big brands like IKEA and Foot Locker have given us emoji depicting Allen keys and fancy sneakers, but are those sorely missing from our daily emoji interactions in the first place?Image via IKEA

Unless your message is somewhere along the lines of “Taking our dachshund to IKEA for some meatballs,” (although that personally sounds like a dream day to me) it’s unlikely that people will go on using custom emoji keyboards on a regular basis—which is a questionable result for so much dedicated design work.

If you do decide to create your own custom emoji, instead of inventing new icons for fun, why not do it for a good cause? Take WWF, who created a set of custom emoji to represent endangered animal species.

#EndangeredEmoji icons came with a specific set of instructions: whenever a user Tweeted one of the custom emoji, a donation would be made to save the animal’s real-life counterpart. Besides being adorable, this kind of custom emoji campaign gives your audience a reason to continue using the emoji in the future.
Create an interactive experience

You don’t have to create your own custom emoji keyboard to get people talking. Think about the reason why brands choose to include emoji in their marketing campaigns: they’re something familiar to most mobile users who use them in their everyday communications.

Incorporate this habit and make your audience part of the campaign. For example, U.S. beverage brand Tampico made up a social media game that requires users to guess a winning emoji combination out of 24 options.

Participants were asked to comment on the company’s social media channels with their emoji guesses and include the campaign hashtag, #TampicoEmojiball. Once the campaign was closed, the increased user engagement made it clear that Tampico was one of the big winners themselves.

It doesn’t take too many emoji to win an award or the affection of your audience or customers. Domino’s Emoji Ordering campaign focused on a single emoji: the pizza slice. Tweeting the emoji to Domino’s official account along with a hashtag #EasyOrder allows users to place an order in a matter of seconds.

The campaign combined the popularity of emoji with a new way to bring its products to customers. If you want to get people talking about your brand using emoji, give them a good reason to talk to you first.
Recognize the appropriate time and place for emoji

As with text messaging, a lot can get lost in translation when using emoji in professional communications. To make sure that your emoji use doesn’t end up feeling like you’re playing a digital game of ‘telephone,’ be sure that you not only know the meaning of your emoji (as mentioned above) as well as the context.

Are you sending an email to your company’s CEO requesting a serious meeting? Maybe you don’t want to use the winking face emoji. Is your company’s CEO your little brother? Now that emoji could be appropriate.

An important factor to consider here are demographics. Who your audience is will have a big impact on if and how you use emoji in your messaging. I would never imply that “millennials” (a word that’s like nails on the chalkboard to me) are the only ones who will respond well to your brand’s use of emoji, but you’ll need to do some audience research and testing to figure out just who you’re talking to.

So if you’re an email marketer and thinking about using an emoji in one of your subject lines, try it for one week. The next week, don’t use any emoji in your email subject lines or body. Which test had higher open and click-through rates ?

The same testing model can be used on social media. Pay attention to your levels of engagement and the reception from your audience when you use emoji and when you don’t. You can then use this information to drive future social media campaigns and strategies.

A world without emoji is not a world I want to be a part of. Heed the advice here to get the most out of your emoji marketing campaign, and bring a little 😄 to your audience and online community.