How to Promote Yourself on Social Media? The Secret of SEO 2

sharing*

In this post I reveal the secret of SEO 2.0!

By 2023 it’s rather known as “social SEO”.

At the end of the day social media is about SEO too or SEO 2!

It shows how to promote yourself on social media.

SEO 2? I sometimes also explain it as

  • Sharing
  • Engagement
  • Outreach

You can make other people promote you for free! No joke!

Sounds impossible? It’s not a contradiction.

Fasten your seat belts! This will blow your mind!


Why Spread the Word and Not Keep it Secret?

Why am I revealing the secret? It’s because the more people know it the better it works.

It also works for me then! Thus I will show you the way of SEO 2 – it’s:

  • sustainable
  • reputable
  • social
  • trustworthy
  • organic

SEO 2 works without the need of aggressive self-promotion on social media and beyond. It works without manual link building as well.

There are only a few thousands SEO experts out there but millions of webmasters.

Conventional SEO practitioners – more often the average webmasters than not – have only very superficial knowledge of SEO.

Thus most people get social media promotion wrong.

They approach it with a selfish SEO 1.0 mindset like it’s 1999.

You have to apply social SEO or SEO 2 instead!


Selfish vs Selfless Engagement Online

Selfish people tend to promote themselves on all kinds of social media and beyond. I prefer not to. Now those of you who know me will shout:

“Wait, you just spammed me this week!”

OK, I admit it! I tweet my posts and share them on LinkedIn. Other than that, I really want to make the SEO 2.0 blog a proof of concept:

You can succeed on the Web – especially as a blogger – without all the ego-driven tactics like:

  • self-promotion
  • share or link begging
  • befriending people just for their social media power
  • vote swapping or exchange

The ideal vision for SEO 2.0 (both the blog and the concept) was, besides of refraining from the above ways of “promotion”, to be based on

  1. independence from Google traffic
  2. independence from Facebook traffic
  3. being proud of practicing SEO
  4. organic reach growth
  5. flourishing even during my absence

I succeeded at most of these goals. Why did I go the hard way?

Wasn’t it absurd to shun Google and Facebook in their heydays, the most important traffic sources of the Web? Let me explain!

Practicing SEO means that sooner or later you normally adapt to each and every annoyance of the Web. Typical Internet annoyances are:

  • Making sites Google friendly means often crippling them, especially when you work on a limited budget and with people who don’t know much about user experience (most people don’t).
  • Being an SEO and using Facebook is like being gay and trying to talk about having kids with heterosexuals. Either you shut your mouth and everybody accepts you or have a coming out and have to deal with the consequences like ostracism.
  • There is either “automation” or real engagement – a kind of DIY everything. Some people bombard you with automated updates on Twitter while others listen and respond genuinely.

OK, so what’s the secret? The secret of SEO 2.0 is a little ZEN-like.

It’s about forgetting your ego and doing everything you want for yourself for others. It works.

As I’m addicted to social media anyway I spend hours daily with sharing content of other people. I popularize things I like and rarely out of friendship.


The Invisible Hand of Reciprocity

Of course I read the content of my friends first but if I don’t like them (the content pieces, not the friends) I don’t share them.

I befriend the people whose content I like. The things I popularize on social media are mostly not even related to SEO etc.

People on the Web basically know a few things about me, this guy is:

  • genuine
  • authentic
  • very active on the Web
  • has multiple interests (open minded)
  • not self centered but altruistic

Is this enough? Well, it isn’t.

You need to have a blog, a unique voice and you need to do some social networking to be recognizable.

I tend to take this for granted by now. It’s about having a unique blog, a few active social media profiles and connected with a small number of friends on several platforms.

Add the secret of SEO 2.0 to it and it is perfectly enough to get almost every single post of yours shared all over the place even those which weren’t optimized for social media.

Also you get links as these friends tend to link to friends in their blogs.

Then the friends of the friends link to you and befriend you etc. etc. etc. The rest is history.

You don’t need self-promotion to promote yourself and you not even have to be a popular blogger to make it work.

How? I get promoted while I promote others and it’s not even an exchange or something.

It works due to reciprocity.

People who have benefited from my actions in the past remember that and reciprocate in the future by sharing or linking my content.

* (CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons image by włodi