What Are Social Media Backlinks? (Definition & Examples)
In this article, we will answer the question, “What are social media backlinks?”
But we will go beyond the definition of social media backlinks.
You will also get to know about the different types of social media links that count as backlinks and how much social media backlinks help SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
By the end, you will know if social media links are a good fit for your link building strategy and how these types of backlinks can affect your website rankings and traffic.
What are Social Media Backlinks?
Social media backlinks are any links on social media websites that link back to your site. Social media backlinks can be placed in user profiles, within posts, in comments, and shared as direct links to social feeds on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit.
Types of Social Media Backlinks
- Text backlinks in posts and user profiles from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
- Images sites like Instagram and Snapchat with backlinks on user profiles
- Videos with backlinks in descriptions and overlays from Youtube, Vimeo, and TikTok
- Forum backlinks in posts, comments, and profiles from Reddit, Quora, and Digg
- Bookmarking backlinks from Pinterest and Flipboard
Do social media count as backlinks?
Social media counts as backlinks because any link that takes people back to your business website is actually a backlink. You should use social media to link to your website to generate backlinks for your content to increase visibility and traffic.
Do Social Media Links Help SEO?
Social media links can help SEO to increase ranking in search engines directly and indirectly. The benefits of social media links add to SEO performance as it enhances content performance and provides more opportunities to get backlinks from other websites to improve domain authority and PageRank scores.
according to this This Case Study on Fat Stack Blog, “Building backlinks and achieving resulting social media engagement can help SEOs for ranking long-tail keyword content in Google SERPs.” However, it is said, “Social media links and engagement alone will not make content rank higher in SERPs for competing keywords (if it were, I would have a lot of organic search traffic).”
- Social signals can give your content a huge, but very temporary, SERP boost in Google.
- Tweets from power users can affect short-term rankings for certain keywords.
- Retweets and Facebook likes/shares make a difference for low-competition keywords, even pages with duplicate content.
Bottom Line: Social media links can help drive visitors to your website through organic searches and the network itself for keywords with less competition. And over time, these visitors can eventually link to your content which helps to improve SEO and the total number of backlinks your website receives.
Therefore, every website owner should make social media backlinks a part of their long-term link building strategy. These types of links are built quickly and there are no negative side effects for SEO; Positive performance only.
How do I create social media backlinks?
You can create social media backlinks by placing your website links in the following places: user profiles, social media posts, comments, business descriptions and video overlays. You can also connect with other brands and bloggers to build social media backlinks for your website.
Social media backlinks summary
As you found out, social media backlinks are different types of text links, image links and video links that are shared on social feeds such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. And while social media links don’t always have a direct impact on competing SEO keywords, there are documented cases of these backlinks providing a quick boost in ranking for long-tail keywords with less competition.
