7 Social Link Building Tips
A review of how social behavior can create valuable relationships and influence your link building efforts.
A review of how social behavior can create valuable relationships and influence your link building efforts.
The social media rage continues unabated, and with great reason. There is a lot to be gained by engaging with social media. However, social media is only one component of social link building.
The value of a received link can vary greatly. One link can easily be worth 1 million times more than another link, but more valuable links are much scarcer than less valuable ones. You can visualize this as a pyramid:
As it turns out, the social landscape isn’t that much different. There are probably some relationships that are far more valuable to you than others.
For example, while each customer represents a valuable relationship, having a relationship with a highly influential media person who can get your message out to millions of potential customers will be more valuable to you. As with the high value links, there are inherently fewer of those higher value relationships to be had, as represented in this chart:
You can see that these scenarios have the same pyramid shape. Of course, there is some linkage here too. The most valuable relationships often are more valuable because they have the most valuable links to give.
As with link building, developing those more valuable relationships will require more effort. While many people are vying for each individual customer, the amount of effort typically made by people (such as your competition) to develop those higher value relationships is much higher. As a result it takes more effort to stand out and develop credibility with them.
Here’s a list of seven types of social activity that can play a role in developing relationships and link building:
Some things aren’t in this list, such as phone calls, but it’s pretty easy to figure out where other activities fit in.
For example, phone calls would probably go between LinkedIn and blogging. However, you would have to reconsider that if the call is unsolicited. Unsolicited calls inherently start by instilling distrust — not a good way to start any relationship!
Here’s a look at all of our social activities in a pyramid format:
The bottom represents the least personal, least effort part of the spectrum, and the top represents the most personal, most effort.
How Does This All Relate to Link Building?
Building trust is a crucial element in link building. Regardless of how you go about it, the person providing the link has to believe that the recipient page and website is deserving of visibility on their site.
You aren’t going to give a link to someone who you think is a dirty rotten spammer, or whom you don’t trust. All the social channels discussed above are ways of building trust.
There are tradeoffs between volume and level of trust that can be built, just as there are tradeoffs in volume and the value of a relationship. Successful web marketers will work the trust and effort pyramids to maximum affect.
So in principle, you can merge our two pyramids to create a visual view of using social techniques as a link building tool:
Higher levels of social activity should be used to pursue higher quality links.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t get high quality links from Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn — you can. These spaces can be quite effective in helping you start a dialogue with a major influencer in your space. Given the impact they have on your goals, however, you should seek to move them up the chain to more personal levels of communication as quickly as you can.