We have tried to pick out the best social link building tools we use on a daily basis. Social media is a good way of finding and sourcing backlinks for your website and most businesses today with an online presence should have a social media strategy. This is not an exhaustive list, if you know of any other good ones feel free to let us know in the comments below; however, this is a great starting point for anybody looking to expand their link building efforts.
Finding Forums
Forums are a good platform for engagement within certain communities. There are thousands of forums on the web, each specialising in its own niche topic and therefore are good places to engage with potential customers. Here are a few tools to help you find forums:
- Boardtracker
- Boardreader
Finding Blogs
Blogs are also a good way to find and engage within communities. Most blogs nowadays have a good social presence which gives you further platforms to engage with followers of that blog and fellow industry experts. They can also be a source of links, by either leaving a helpful comment or contacting the blog to see if you could write a guest post for them. Here are some tools to help you find subject related blogs:
- Google Blog Search (or Google Search: See post on finding niche link sources)
- Technorati
- Icerocket
Bookmarking Tools
Bookmarking is a good way of sharing links to sites or articles with your followers and others on the web. There are many good social bookmarking websites around; there are also some specialist Bookmarking websites who operate within a specific niche.
One useful tool is a website called Only Wire. This tool allows you to enter your login details on some of the most popular Bookmarking websites today and auto-fill a submission to submit to the websites you select. One benefit is that you can vary each submission individually if you wish to. This tool is definitely a handy time saver.
Developing Relationships
Relationships are key to a successful social media strategy. You want to help others and network rather than spam the social sphere. There are many social platforms and tools out there and more being developed everyday which may have their uses. Here are some of the best and most popular.
A tool predominantly for networking with your peers, it is increasingly being used by businesses to interact within various communities and as a place to gain new business. Links can be created by creating a business page, a Facebook group or joining a Facebook group if related to your industry.
Twitter is a great place to network, acquire followers and interact with professionals in the same industry as yourselves. It is an ideal platform to let your followers know of any recent blog posts or new services you may have. This in turn could create re-tweets which potentially can reach many people. Each individual who comes across your content could link to your content if they like it. That’s the power of Twitter.
Blogging
A blog is the ultimate social tool. You can use it to talk about your business and services or write about what’s happening in your industry. A blog that contains a mix of information surrounding a topic will gain more followers compared to one that contains posts related to a business’ own news.
You can socialise your Blog which enables visitors to share the content over their own Social Media spaces. This will not only create links, it will attract new visitors to your site.
Guest blogging is another strategy that can attract links and visitors to your site. Writing a blog post for another website in exchange for a link can be great for a strong backlink. As almost all blogs have a reasonable level of readership (be selective in who you contact) you are bound to reach new individuals who are likely going to be interested in what you have to say.
Question & Answer Sites
Question and Answer sites are good resources to monitor. By answering questions you are giving something back to the community and it gives you the opportunity to link to your own content if you feel it can help the user.
One popular example at the moment is Quora, some others include Yahoo Answers and Aardvark.
If I have missed any you use regularly, let me know using the comments below.
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