How to Get Social Mentions for SEO: Identify Influencers

After inbound links, getting your URL’s mentioned on social media is beneficial for SEO.
Google pays a lot of attention to what URL’s are getting ‘Tweeted,’ or ‘Shared’ on Google+, Facebook, etc. So, in this video, I will show you how to use Twitter advanced search to identify influencers as well as Buzzsumo to do the same. Let’s get started!

• Watch the Video
• Links and Resources (scroll down below the video)

Watch the Video

Using Twitter Advanced Search

Google pays attention to Twitter as part of their “firehose” deal. Accordingly, you want to research Twitter to find influencers who will tweet out your URLs (e.g., a blog post, infographic, or eBook). To do so –

1. Sign into your Twitter account, and go to Twitter Advanced Search, here.
2. Enter your keywords, and find accounts (“influencers”) that have tweeted out relevant content (similar to your own).
3. Research the “influence” of the account, especially –
   1. The number of followers (vs. those that they follow)
   2. The keyword themes that they tweet on (are they relevant to your website?)
4. Tweet “to” this person and solicit them tweeting your own URL (for example, “Hey, I have this awesome blog post on such-and-such, and I wanted to alert you to it. Perhaps you might share it with your audience?”

You can use the same process on Google+, but it is much more difficult to reach out to someone via Google+ than Twitter (not to mention that Google+ is pretty much dead). However, Google seems to still prefer / use Google+, so do consider reaching out to anyone (still) active on Google+.

Using Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo (http://www.buzzsumo.com) has a freemium model. They allow three or so searches per day, but if you’re willing to pay up ($99 / month), then this is really an amazing tool. How so?

• Enter your keywords and find content that is being shared by week, month, year, etc. Then find the influencers behind it (especially on Twitter).
• Enter a competitor URL and find out who is sharing their content. (Is this cool or what?)

For example, we can take “organic baby food.” For which the highest ranking sites on Google are – Earthsbest.com, plumorganics.com, and sproutorganicfoods.com. Thus you can enter both your keywords (“organic baby food”) and/or competitor URL’s, to identify influencers. The final task is to “reach out” to these influencers and get them to share your content on their Twitter, G+, Facebook, etc., and don’t forget to mention – THEIR BLOG as blogs are HUGE for SEO!  (You should always prefer a blog link (if possible) to a social media mention, as links are still the “gold standard” of SEO.)