After living through the brightest days of social media with Facebook, we lived through the coining of the word seeding in the same period. A good many social media agencies did work in this field, and a large share of that work left advertisers disappointed. In this article we will look closely at the reasons for that, and we will also take a look at seeding as it stands today.
Seeding had its brightest recent period on Twitter, with the words people wanted to push into the trending topics.
What Is Seeding?
It is the general name given to a kind of agenda setting work on social media, resting on a post being shared by various pages and users, and then shared again among the followers and friends of the accounts that shared it. Seeding is carried out through social platforms that hold active users, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo and LinkedIn.
An important note :
Posts made through blogs do not sit inside seeding, which follows the logic of social sharing exactly. Work done on blogs has to be assessed on an SEO basis, and sharing the same content from dozens of different blogs at once causes pollution on the internet, so that has to be assessed in the spam category.
What Should a Social Seeding Strategy Look Like?
The Effect of Organic and Inorganic Follower Growth
First of all, if you have decided on social media seeding work, take care that the pages and users of the seeding agency you work with are organic. If they hold follower audiences gathered by inorganic means, your posts will meet no interest at all. Some social media accounts with millions of followers, and these are rather large accounts. With some of our advertising clients the returns stayed at around 100 visitors, and that caused us serious disappointment. A share of large pages like those gathered their followers by inorganic means, so their returns will be rather weak. That is why the pages the seeding work will run on should be examined, and how large an audience their earlier posts reached should be observed.
The Effect of an Eye Catching Post on Seeding Success
The fundamental element in seeding has to do with other users interacting with the post. The reach strategy of social media works on this logic. You make the post, and it is shown to 100 test users. At least 1 person out of those 100 is expected to interact with it. For every 1 person who interacts, another group of 100 people is unlocked and the post is carried to them. That is how the post reaches all the users of a page, and of pages.
The fundamental model of interaction in seeding is said to be “sharing”, rather than users liking or commenting. That is why the post in question has to hold enough quality for a user to be willing to share it.
Seeding Contributes to SEO in a Positive Way
There is important interaction between social media and the search engines. Google denied it until a few years ago, but these days they said that work on social media, and the state of the official page of the site in general, set some parameters running in SEO. To begin with, the working logic of Google rests on “content people will like”. So human liking and the search engine's understanding of quality rest on similar algorithms. In other words, a shared page that brings successful results in seeding will already bring successful positions on Google. That is a natural process, and their fundamental logics cross this way.
For content of yours shared on social media to contribute to the search engines, the post first has to be open to “Everyone”. Otherwise Google cannot know whether that post was made at all. The more it is shared as “open to everyone” on people's pages, the more it contributes to your SEO work.
