Does your brand’s activity on its social accounts impact its search rankings? Maybe[1]. Maybe not[2]. But does it matter anyway?
I shouldn’t have to convince you that investing in a social media for your company is worth it; even in light of Facebook’s recent data breach, we are so reliant upon our social profiles for real human interaction that leaving them is not a real option[3]. In fact, the below statistics from Pew Research Center’s 2018 Social Media Use Survey[4] indicate that we’re not going to give up our social media profiles any time soon.
Humans are social creatures. It makes sense that we love being on social networking sites. We crave interaction with fellow humans. We’re also highly likely to trust the recommendations of our friends and family (Nielsen[5]) and those recommendations often influence our purchasing decisions. We ask our loved ones for advice on where to put our dollars in myriad ways, all at different price points:
- What coffee shop do you like to go to?
- Which mascara is that?
- What are you reading right now?
- Where’d you get that tie?
- What neighborhoods are you looking to move to?
- What schools are you looking to send Anna to?
Yes, those same searches occur online. They also frequently occur in tandem with testimonials from the people in our lives (depending on how thorough we want or need to be).
So if you have a thing that you want to sell to a group of people and you’re still not pursuing a social strategy, I don’t understand what you’re doing. Yes, it’s 2018 and I still find