What are social signals in the context of online engagement (and what aren’t they)? 

When we talk about social signals, we’re talking about information generated by social media interactions that act as a proxy for judging popular reception of that content. Or, in plain English: Likes, shares, comments, mentions… all the actions that signal “people are interested in this!” 

These are true of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, etc., although it’s important to keep an eye on how different platforms’ value for your objectives change — whether due to algorithm changes that make them less or more impactful, changing user bases, or other factors. For example, in the last couple years since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and rebrand to X, both its algorithm and over time most active user base has changed in a way that has serious ramifications for business there, mostly in not-so-great ways. (On that note, keep an eye on Bluesky, maybe?) 

Pretty much, social signals give you insight into not just 1) how well your strategy and presence is working, but 2) how well different social media platforms themselves are working for you. With this information, you can adjust your own work, content, and posting, and also adjust how many resources you dedicate to certain social platforms over others. 

What social signals are not, is a direct ranking factor for your search ranking. 

Direct ranking factors include things like increased backlinks, optimized keywords, and other aspects that Google and other search engines directly take into consideration. 

Meanwhile, it’s important to acknowledge that these signals are merely a proxy for user interest, preference, etc. — so they aren’t impacting your search engine ranking. But they do imply user behaviors that favorably impact your ranking — potentially increased users on your site, more time spent on your site, greater click-through-rate, and more — so can implicitly give you a peek into how your social media work is, well, working. 

Image Source: https://en.ryte.com/wiki/Social_Signals/ 

Social signals and SEO: How are they connected? 

We’ve already alluded to this above, but that really just scratched the surface. 

Good social signals tend to be associated with a number of increased factors that improve your search ranking. For example: 

Increased visibility and traffic: As you can imagine, if a lot of people are liking, sharing, and otherwise engaging with a social media post linking to your website, it’s a pretty good bet that a certain percentage of them are also navigating to your site from there. As we all know, website traffic is a huge factor in how a page is ranked by search engines. 

Increased backlinks: This isn’t always assured, but increased social signals can lead to more backlinks. When you have high social signals, you increase your visibility and subsequently can attract more backlinks from more authoritative sites, boosting your own implied authority, and improving your SEO. 

Increased brand awareness and trust: Now, we should start with the caveat that “trust” is not a given just from increased social signals in the same way that brand awareness is. You can get a lot of ostensibly “good” social signals by acting and posting in ways that users can see through as untrustworthy, unauthoritative, and generally transparent. But, if you don’t take shortcuts here and focus on content that’s both engaging and high quality, you can both increase users’ awareness of your brand, and in the process increase your own authority. 

Consistently being an engaging, high quality voice, will not only attract interest from people, but will lead to them wanting to come back to you for your expertise. And that improves your SEO. 

It’s a win-win for you and your users! 

“Freshness” of content: This not only contributes to SEO itself, but also impacts other direct ranking factors in ways that you can probably put together based on what we’ve already said. “Freshness” indicates that you’re active — on your site, social media, and other channels you participate in — and through extension are still providing relevant, timely information for your visitors. 

Furthermore, by creating consistent content that can’t be found anywhere else, of a quality that can’t be found anywhere else, and that is at the forefront of your area of expertise, you’ll do exactly what we just talked about above: show people (and search engines) that you are consistent, trustworthy, and through extension worth seeking out. 

Leveraging these social signals for better SEO 

Since we’ve established that strong social signals lead to your business and site performing better in search engines, how can you subsequently make sure your social presence is leading to those strong signals? 

To start: Be active on social media 

Implied in this is that it’s better to be more active on fewer social media platforms than less active on more. 

You can of course take this too far in that direction, but we find it’s historically been more common for businesses to stretch themselves too thin, sign up for every social platform under the sun, and then not have the ability to keep up on them consistently. (Obviously, the best case scenario is to be appropriately active on all the relevant social media platforms, but we recognize not everyone has the time and human resources to do that!) 

Posting regularly — albeit in a “curated,” quality way versus, say, 10 clearly engagement bait posts a day — and engaging with your audience boosts your visibility and leads to people returning in the future. 

Create relevant content whose quality makes it shareable 

How many times have you seen something on a social media platform that makes you go “Oh my gosh, I have to send this to [insert friend, coworker, family member, etc.]!” Keep that in mind when creating your own posts. 

Producing content that’s A) high quality and B) relatable and/or informative makes more of your audience want to share it. Multimedia like videos or infographics or blog posts are especially good here. 

Encourage engagement 

Along with giving people content they want to share, you can give them a nudge by making it easier to do so — take steps like adding social media sharing buttons on your website and blogs, for example. Even when people like something, the vast majority of them won’t share it and they certainly won’t take any extra steps to do so if it’s not immediately obvious how to. 

At the same time, you can run interactive campaigns or contests to encourage people to interact with your work. And, like we already mentioned, engaging with people in comments and other ways is always good! (Or, almost always. Probably best to not get into comments section fights and other dumb things but we hopefully don’t need to say that?) 

Monitor and measure social media impact 

Yeah, we talk about this aspect of a business’ online presence constantly, but that’s because it’s true: To be getting the most out of this, you have to be keeping an eye on metrics that matter — not just judging performance purely on estimates and vibes. 

Tracking your social media performance helps you see what of your content is resonating and what’s falling flat. 

Which metrics matter most to you will vary depending on your intent, but common ones to track include: 

• Impressions 

• Comments 

• Shares (or the platform equivalent, like retweets or reposts) 

• Link clicks 

• Mentions 

• Likes/reactions 

• Click-through-rate 

• Follower/subscriber count 

Keep track of how these change and the direction they’re moving. Tools like Google Analytics or Hootsuite can be helpful here. 

The bottom line: Social signals and SEO feed into the other, snowballing either positively or, when neglected… negatively 

Good social signals means you’re providing content to your audience that’s high quality, relevant, and engaging — not coincidentally, search engine’s algorithms historically try to value the same thing. 

So, while social signals themselves don’t impact your SEO, they allude to other factors that do impact it. Think of them as indirect markers towards your SEO performance — for that reason, we encourage every brand to consider their social media when crafting an SEO strategy, and think of each as integral to the other. 

Now, we’d also be remiss to not close with the reminder: If you’re ever looking for help with your company site’s SEO, don’t hesitate to contact Fujisan!