Social media is not only a cheap way to reach an online audience and market your business, it actually plays a vital role in search engine optimization.
Google picks up your social media activity and uses that to determine your site's trustworthiness as it makes your website more legitimate from their algorithms viewpoint.
The most important aspects of social media activity are shares, like and comments of the actual content that you post. This does mean that the amount of likes your page has is mostly irrelevant, however, the more likes your page has does increase the chances of someone interacting with your posted content.
So make sure that when you are targeting new followers that you would rather have a small amount who engage in the content, not just a large following who do not do anything.
The amount you post also matters, it can’t be once a month, it has to be continual. Of course don’t overdo it to the point you lose followers however you will only see consistent increase in your search engine rankings if you are consistent in your efforts.
This doesn’t mean you have to be posting original content every day, break it up by posting content from elsewhere that is related to your business and that your followers would enjoy. However, Google does prefer original content as it picks up the link that is going directly to your site.
This little bit of extra work could be the difference between 1st and 2nd page ranking in Google search results pages, with only 6% of users ever going past the first page, it’s definitely worth the effort.
Even if your business does not traditionally engage in social media, every little bit helps. Keep in mind that search rankings do not shift dramatically overnight, so keep the consistent, quality content coming and you will see improvements over time.