No business can afford to stay away from the social media. From the grocery at the street corner to the biggest international brands, you will find all sorts of companies on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube. As a chiropractor, you also need to include social media in your overall digital marketing campaign. However, you don’t have the time to be active on all these platforms. This is why we will discuss the best social media for SEO – platforms whose content is indexed by Google and other search engines.
The Danger of Social Media Marketing: Spreading Out Too Much
When businesses first started hearing about the benefits of social media, they hurried up to create accounts on all of them. After a bout of enthusiastic posting and winning followers, they slowly started to lose sight of various platforms.
Why is that bad? Well, for one thing, nobody likes to get on a neglected Facebook or Instagram page. A lot of potential patients would be actually turned off by reaching a page with infrequent posts or which did not get any update in months.
The second danger of spreading out your social media marketing too much is…SEO. When we talk about social media for SEO, we also consider a key aspect shared by search engine representatives: they take into account social media page activity in determining the page rank for a company’s website.
What Exactly Indexes Google and Bing?
The two main search engines (albeit with a huge gap of popularity between them) have clear stances on social media: social signals and content are important for determining the authority, reputation and trustworthiness of a website.
Here is what you need to know about the best social media for SEO from the way search engines index their content:
1. What Are the Top Tree Social Media for SEO in Terms of Page Rank?
Let us start with the first obvious link between social media and SEO: the Google page rank of the respective platforms. From this point of view, the top three platforms are:
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn.
What does this mean? Applying the backlink principle that a page rank equity is transferred to the page it links back to, we may say that business profiles on high ranking social networks will also boost your own page rank.
2. The Importance of Social Media Profiles for SEO
Google indexes social media profiles, especially from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. When users are looking for a service or for a business name, they will see their social media profiles among the top Google results.
What does this mean for your chiropractic practice? Let’s say that someone is looking for chiropractors in their area. They reach your Facebook or LinkedIn page. They click on one of your posts and reach your website. From here onwards, you have the chances to capture a new lead and nurture them until they decide to become your patient.
3. Strong Social Signals Boost Your Reputation
The best social media for SEO benefits your practice in two ways:
• You gain more followers who start trusting you enough to become patients
• Google assigns a higher level of trustworthiness to your website.
How does this work? First of all, let us understand social signals. These are:
• Likes
• Comments
• Shares.
If you are good at creating engaging social media posts, a lot of users will interact with them and refer their own friends to follow your page. This is how social media builds brand equity: the more engagements (social signals) your page has, the more reliable your chiropractic practice appears, both to potential patients and to search engines.
4. Popular Social Media Platforms Are a Source of Valuable Backlinks
Last but not least, when you are active on the best social media for SEO, you also increase your chances of earning valuable backlinks. A lot of researchers, journalists and thought leaders are using the social media to look for interesting ideas, new developments and any potential source of inspiration for their own content.
When they find a well written, helpful and informative article on chiropractic (shared from your website), they may use it as a reference in one of their own article, and insert a backlink to your own website.
Being active on social media is a must for any chiropractor. Apart from boosting your SEO efforts, you may get a steady flow of potential patients. If you need help with setting up or optimizing your social media profiles, don’t hesitate to contact our SEO experts!