SEO lessons from the most successful social media campaigns

Social media marketing is one of the smartest ways to get the attention of the world. The worldwide web is a very hospitable place, hosting at least a billion people at any given minute of the day. A majority of these people are on some social media platform or another one. If they are not chatting up their friends on Facebook they are keeping up with the Twitter influencers or tracking Instagram posts.

The number of social media sites that are available today continues to grow. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are just some of the many.

When you want to make the most of social media you will have to understand the psychology of the people who are using these sites. It is notable that you do not have to create a profile on all the social media sites or be active on all of them. If you capitalize on two or three of them you will be good to go. You just need to know how to make use of these platforms excellently to get the best of results.

Social media and search engines

The relationship between social media sites and search engines is not anything new today. A social media website is just a site like any other only that it allows people to interact on it. When you open your e-commerce website, your buyers will only be interacting with you and not with each other. The search engines index the activities that are taking place on the social media sites. The most famous profiles get the most attention from the search engines.

Google being the largest search engine in the world has SEO professionals working around the clock trying to figure out how important social signals are to the search engines. It has been well-established that social media activities are very important in the world of SEO. When you create a profile on Facebook and link it to your website, you can expect to note some impact on your website as there will be on your social media site.

Before going any further, let it be known that if you would like to get the most from your social media marketing campaign it is wise to hire professionals in the field. You can get a team of the best social media and search engine marketing experts working for you. These are the professionals that you do not have to hire for in-house work. You can outsource the services. This is what two of the world’s biggest brands did and they go great returns from their social media marketing strategies.

Air Asia and IKEA are two companies that harnessed the power of Facebook and the results of their marketing campaigns are renowned across the globe. Their online marketing campaigns were well thought out and excellently executed. They sought out the help of experts in SEO and social media marketing. There is no way you will talk about marketing on Facebook without mentioning these two brands.

IKEA’s Facebook showroom

People are almost willing to kill each other to get the high quality furniture that is sold by this brand. IKEA seems to know this and for that reason they created an online contest. The company was opening a new outlet in Malmo, Sweden and they wanted to create awareness of the showroom before it was opened. What better way to do that than to give away free furniture (premium quality furniture) on Facebook?

IKEA developed a very simple but extremely genius way of getting word of free furniture out there. Guys love free things and more so if they are from a world renowned brand like IKEA. After creating a profile for the general manager of the Malmo store, IKEA posted pictures of furniture on the profile. The first person to tag themselves in the picture got the piece. People would rather sleep online waiting for the next photo to be posted so that they can get the furniture. Seeing as good news travels fast it was not long before everyone knew about IKEA’s Malmo store.

Air Asia’s Friendsy campaign

Air Asia is not exactly the largest of airlines on the planet, but then they proved that they can get the attention of the world without crashing a plane in water. When the airline launched direct flights from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Sydney in Australia they need to get passengers to sign up. The airline is not exactly the most popular of them all and thus they were making some losses when the flights started out.

Their 2012 Facebook campaign dubbed Friendsy did the trick. The campaign was so simple, greatly rewarding to the company and it generated PR value that was worth millions of US dollars. What Air Asia did was give away an airplane for free. Yes, they gave away a full aircraft for free. Okay, it would not be yours eternally but if you took part in the competition you have the opportunity of getting a free flight to Sydney from Kuala Lumpur. The best part of it all is that you had the chance of selecting 300 people who would travel with you. Simply book your position in the plane and tag 302 of your best friends to travel in your plane. As above mentioned people love free things and who would refuse a free flight?

Why these campaigns were very successful?

There is no need of telling you what the campaigns did for the companies’ websites. People wanted to check out what they have to offer. What furniture does IKEA have that will make me want to lose sleep waiting for a photo to be posted on Facebook? Even those Malaysians who had no idea Air Asia existed found out about it.

These campaigns were immensely successful for a number of reasons. First, they were very organized. They have the goal well defined and this made it possible to develop the campaign in a streamlined manner. Secondly, they offered something to the Facebook users. People on the internet will do favors for you if you offer them something. Thirdly, the tasks for the participants were very simple. Tagging a person in a photo is just a click of a button. And finally, they were developed by professionals in social media marketing. Seek out the best of SEO experts near you and you will have your site performing at its best within a very short time.

Derek Iwasiuk run’s national digital search engine optimization firm has its headquarters in Minneapolis. He spends a lot of his free time educating the minds of thousands of young SEO’s and top agencies. You can also follow him on Twitter @Diwasiuk and find out more about search engine marketing.