Social media management is a lot like search engine optimization. You have to work at it to make it start to pay off. Stuffing a page with keywords doesn’t work. You also shouldn’t expect to put up a Facebook page and get 1,000 fans in a week. It’s going to take time and SEO best practices.

Some best practices that people use for SEO can also be used for social media marketing. In fact if you are good at one, you are probably going to be pretty good at another. Here are five best practices that both SEO and social media have in common.

5 SEO Best Practices

It’s All About Clicks

If your website doesn’t show up in the search engines you won’t get any clicks, similarly if you don’t post a link in Twitter or Facebook, no one is going to visit your website. Always post a link to something.

Timing Is Everything

If your website is out of date Google will think your website is old and will crawl it less often. If you post new content it might take Google awhile to index it. Similarly in social media if your Facebook page doesn’t have an update for a month, your brand is not going to show up in someone’s news feed to click on a link and arrive at your site.

Referrals Are King!

If someone puts up your domain on their website as a link, Google considers your site to be something of note around those keywords because someone took the time to link their site to yours. Similarly in social media marketing, people sharing content also can act as a referral spreading your domain across Facebook and Twitter.

Be Patient

This is a siege. Google is not going to rank you #1 for SEO because you wrote one blog. You are not going to have 1,000 fans because you keep putting up pictures from your website on your Facebook page. You should give both at least six months to start to show dividends in the form of leads and sales. However, because both have such incredible reach to billions of people, the ROI will end up being positive in the end.

Analytics Show The Way

For SEO you can use Google Analytics for free or a company like HubSpot which provides a better analytics on SEO and will host your website. Facebook and YouTube offer Insights which will show you “likes” and how many times a video is viewed. The analytics of both SEO and social media will tell you what’s working and what’s not. So if you are beating your head against the wall trying to get ranked higher for a particular keyword or getting to 10,000 fans but other keywords or social networks are bringing in dollars. STOP beating your head against the wall. Double down on your existing fans and traffic producing keywords and enjoy those dollars.