Already this week, I've looked at generating inbound links using technical PR and generating inbound links using Blogging. Today I'm going to do the same thing with respect to social media.
The first step is to take advantage of the inbound links that each social media web site offers as part of the profile creation process. Here's a fairly comprehensive list of social media sites that you might like to consider creating profiles on (the business focussed ones are half way down the page). Each of these will allow you to say who you are and create a link to your own Web site; these links are normally quite valuable.
As you can see, there are well over 20 business focussed networking sites on that list, so creating a profile on each one is a link building campaign in its own right.
Once you have your profiles established, you can then start sharing content on these sites. The objective of doing this is to create link bait; attractive and interesting content that the people you are connected to on your network are interested in linking to from their own blogs or Web sites.
Clearly, when you share that content you also generate a link. And if that content is re-shared on each network (re-tweeted on Twitter for instance) then there is also a link generated there. However, these links that appear 'in-stream' on the network normally have little or no value as part of an optimisation campaign. Furthermore, in order to meet the restrictions on the numbers of characters you can use, the links themselves will probably be shortened using a URL shrinker. They do, of course, have a value of their own because they generate traffic to your site.
So, if you haven't already, start creating social media profiles, start sharing link bait and watch your site's ranking rise and rise.
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