There are those who think that Facebook and Twitter are the only relevant social networks when it comes to business. There are those who go so far as saying that Facebook is all that you need. In truth, both may be right, but that’s strictly from a social perspective. Once you throw search into the equation, Google+, Pinterest, and Tumblr start having a bit more relevance than before.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s definitely social benefits that can be acquired through the “three lesser social networks”. It’s not all about search, but if for search and search alone you’re able to find value, at least you’re in there and participating.

These sites (and others, of course, but we’re going to focus on these three) are able to improve social signals to your website. These social signals, a mysterious but undisputed component of the Google search ranking algorithm, can help your pages get indexed more quickly and demonstrate popularity in the social sites that would normally not be achievable. This is not a license or recommendation to go and spam these sites by any means. At the end of the day, the quality of the content must still be high.

Let’s take a look at the quick and easy process. If you do it once a day, every day at a minimum, you will get benefit sooner rather than later.

Find the Right Content

You can’t just start spamming pages that are important to you like contact forms. There needs to be a social component of some sort with the links. You have to find or build the right pages that can resonate. Sometimes, that means finding pages that we want to rank well in search that can also play well in social. At other times, it means using pages that don’t really benefit us from a search perspective. Some would argue that there’s no reason to share this type of content, but they don’t understand social signals. While posting the direct page itself that you want ranked, there’s a flow of “social signals juice” that flows from a page that does well in social signals to the other pages of your site.

In other words, promoting a strong piece of content that can get more social signals is better than promoting a page that won’t do well in social media but that you would love to have ranked. Focus on the quality of the content and the social signal juice will flow across the board.

In this example, we’re going to use a pre-owned Mercedes. It’s pretty low hanging fruit – people love luxury vehicles on social media – so we’ll be using the vehicle detail page itself. It’s good social content and useful for business – perfect.

This will work nicely. Now, let’s get it some social signals…

Get it on Google+

As with anything that you post on social media, you have to have a story behind it. Just saying something like, “Check out this Mercedes,” that won’t work. There needs to be something socially compelling about it to put it up anywhere.

In the example above, we see the story. It’s a compelling plea to touch the desires of the audience. Once we’ve laid the groundwork in the text, we want to be transparent about what the link is going to do. There’s no need to try to coax people into clicking on the link. Say what it is – “we want you to buy this car”. Note the hashtags – important on every social site except for Facebook (for now).

Now, let’s take a look at Pinterest and Tumblr.

Put it on Pinterest and Tumblr

There are a few different options here. Mix them up. Try a little of everything.

Option one is to post directly from the page itself onto Pinterest and Tumblr. Option two is to post the Google+ post to Pinterest and Tumblr. Option three is to mix it up – put the source on Pinterest and the Google+ post on Tumblr, for example. By mixing it up, you’ll get variety on your Pinterest boards and Tumblog. Also, the signals, when followed, do have a certain level of flow from domain to domain. It’s not as powerful as it is with inbound links, but it’s there nonetheless.

Here it is on Pinterest taking it directly from the source. You’ll note that the text associated with it is shorter, though still includes the hashtag.

On Tumblr, let’s post from the Google+ post. Keep in mind that all three of these sites are relatively interchangeable. In other words, you could post from the source on Tumblr, then pin it and post it to Google+ from there. Of the social signals, Google+ is the most powerful so you won’t want many of those to be from other sources.

Here’s the Tumblr post:

In this case, we posted as a Tumblr link. It could have also been done as a Tumblr image with a link to the post in the content, but then it’s not a social signal but rather an inbound link. No need to go into details about the difference here – as long as you’re getting it posted, that’s better than nothing. You’ll also note that the content itself is duplicated from the Google+ post. I never, NEVER recommend using duplicated content anywhere, but because we’re trying to make it easy enough for you to be willing to do it, I took the lesser of two evils. It’s better that you do it rather than skipping it because it was too hard to do it the best way. The benefits are there even if it isn’t perfect in this scenario.

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Once you get used to the process, it takes about 5-10 minutes. Do it every day. Not everything should be a link to your site. In fact, you should mix in other content regularly. A good mix (despite the fact that I don’t like giving formulas) would be to post 1-2 links to your site per week and fill the other 3-6 with outside content. Mix it up. Have some fun. Get the benefit. Take over your market.