Every recruiter, business owner, or marketing manager strives to find the next best thing that will help launch their business to the next level.  In fact, the savvy business owner knows and understands that technology is here to stay and in order to succeed going forward, they must be on board with all technology driven marketing, including social media.

While social media has become the craze over the last several years, many recruiters are still reluctant to embrace social media, and often are confused about what they should even do.  However, many recruiters are adopting the newest SEO marketing techniques that involve social media signals or social signals.  You are probably asking yourself right now, what are social signals.  Social signals, is just a new term that has been devised to describe activity done by social media users.  It is thought that this activity can help advance web content and includes activity across multiple social media platforms.  For example, it may include Facebook shares or likes, retweets on Twitter, or plus 1’s on other social platforms.

As this new term is being used, many recruiters and marketing consultants are confused about what it really means.  In fact, there has been a lot of confusion and discussion about this topic over the last several years, causing confusion among many, even industry leaders.  In turn, many are changing how they structure their social media marketing, thinking that the changes will rank them higher on Google searches.  The fact remains that social signals is nothing new – just a new term.  Nothing has changed in regards to how social media is ranked on Google.  

Yes, social media is important to your overall marketing campaign, and should be a part of it.  However, if you are under the assumption that your social media efforts alone will rank you high in Google searches, you are mistaken.  Google’s algorithms, have not changed recently.  They are still based on value added, rich content.  Yes, likes and shares are important on your social media marketing campaign, as this gives you additional exposure to potential customers and candidates.  

The best of both worlds would be to provide content on your social media sites that will allow Google to crawl your social media platform and help increase your rankings.  So the question on whether social media signals are important to your SEO marketing campaign, is yes.  Yes, it is important to help improve your rankings and attract customers and candidates, but your social media marketing campaign must be done properly.  Give your customers, candidates, (and Google) what they want – rick content based posts that will have not only your customers and candidates sharing your posts, but Google will index it and rank you higher.