Linking Strategies

How to Use LinkedIn and Twitter for Link Building Eric Enge , Stone Temple Consulting - Oct 26, 2010

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Is there a way to work with social media to get fresh new links to your site? You may not know where to start, so I'll outline the basics of two of the best known social media properties, Twitter, and LinkedIn, with a particular focus on how each might be useful in obtaining links.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great way to network while looking for a jobs. But it can also be quite effective in other ways. LinkedIn provides a powerful advanced search capability you can use to find important business contacts. For example, the following search results screen shows what happened when I searched for director level business development people at Cisco. I was able to find several senior people at Cisco with little difficulty. This is a great start.

Link Building Application: If you want to contact such people to obtain links, you can do so. Many of them provide contact information directly in their public profile. If you purchase one of LinkedIn's paid service levels (costs are $49.95, $99.95, $499.95), you get the ability to send messages to people who have not connected directly with you. The number of "InMails" you are allowed to send runs from 10 to 50, depending on the level of service you buy. This is not enough for a massive outreach campaign, but if there are five people you really want to contact this month you can do it.

One of the main benefits of InMails is that the open rate for these unsolicited communications is far greater than it is when you use traditional e-mail. This means that more people will see your pitch, and that is a good thing. However, given the low volume limit, you should reserve this technique for use on link building targets of very high value. Do you need to reach a senior executive editor at the New York Times? This might just be the best way to do it.

Twitter

Twitter offers some great opportunities, too. With Twitter you can build an audience, then broadcast messages of interest to the people that are "following" you. This is a great way to get the word out on that new promotional program you are offering. In this fashion, it becomes very much like a PR tool.

How do you build that audience? Juice your initial efforts by identifying people who tweet about related things who also have large numbers of followers. You can use services like WeFollow.com to identify them.

Start communicating. Twitter allows you to send out "micro-blog posts" of 140 characters or less. You will need to be crisp! In fact, plan to use no more than 120 characters in your posts, since you want others to forward them ("re-tweet" them) and when they do so, they may want to add a short comment. Also, for a re-tweet, Twitter automatically appends the Twitter handle of the original tweet author, and prepends the letters "RT" to indicate it is a re-tweet (for example, "RT@stonetemple ").

Make a practice of tweeting about things related to your business. Make sure you are adding value to those who are reading your tweets. They don't want to see you talking about how great you are all the time, or see only information on your latest offers. You can do some self promotional tweeting so long as you do so only 20% or less of the time. Show people the value and they will keep following you, and perhaps also re-tweet some of your posts. This will help you build your list of followers very nicely.

Link Building Application: How does this help you with link building? Our testing has shown that when we need to get deep links to a specific portion of the site that messaging your audience on Twitter can help drive those links. The links from Twitter itself don't pass PageRank, as they are marked NoFollow, but many people who are on Twitter also have blogs, and some of them may link to you from there. Of course, you need to be promoting something of quality, or else it is not worth your (or your followers) time.

Summary

The opportunities in social media are many and varied -- and I have only mentioned two. Where do you start? If you have limited time, consider working on just one of the social media sites that best fits your needs.

Twitter takes a fair amount of time and effort to be a successful endeavor. At a minimum, plan on an hour per business day for Twitter. If all you need to do is reach specific targeted people, you may be better off focusing on LinkedIn. As your needs expand, look at Twitter as a way to build an audience and a channel for communicating with them.

Eric Enge is president of Stone Temple Consulting, offering search engine optimization (SEO) services for seven years, for companies ranging from the Fortune 25 to new online start-ups. He is also a co-author of The Art of SEO (O'Reilly, 2010).