The unstable and unofficial relationship between social media and SEO has been bothering every digital marketer for some time. I wasn’t left behind in these debates and, like many others, realized after a while that social media is needed for a full and healthy SEO strategy. But in what way? How can we get the most out of social media while not getting sucked in and spending half of the working day scrawling through Twitter? I’ve found the answer: with the help of social listening.
What is social listening?
For those who don’t already know, simply put, a social media listening/monitoring tool crawls the internet and social platforms and finds mentions of your brand/company/product/CEO or any other valuable keyword. It collects the found mentions in a handy dashboard in real time, so that you can reply, engage, follow the author, or do anything else of your choice with those mentions almost instantly. Social media listening tools like Awario, Brand24, Mention, and such can help a lot with streamlining the process.
Social listening is famously used for a great number of things: improving customer service, increasing brand awareness, preventing social media crises, building the brand’s reputation online, and better understanding the customers (market research). The connection between social listening and SEO isn’t quite that straightforward.
Before we get to it, let me emphasize all the comments on how social media is not a ranking factor. Yes, I won’t claim in any part of this article that social media is one. Since Gary Illyes’ statement[1] in 2016, we are pretty sure that Google doesn’t take social into account directly into their algorithm. So there’s no real controversy on this topic at the moment, even though we never know what