14 Days Journey to GEO – Day 10: Against Social Media

“also they have a limited presence on social media, no instagram which I am not sure is relevant anyway and LinkedIn”

– discussing during on-boarding for our marketing agency services with a client who just brough a new brand into AISQ Growth.

This made me sad. But I wasn’t surprised. I know (I have the experience of working with so many people to know) that companies have become “iffy” about social media.

Holistic SEO never worked without social media.

AEO and GEO also doesn’t work without it. Most of what I taught you already in this 14 Days Journey to GEO was about creating multiple surfaces where you can present clear information about entities.

You DO want your brand to be recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. Half-assed measures don’t work.

If “they have a limited presence” then the only way to ever fix things is to force them to change all that!

The way Google works now and the way ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude recommendations happen, social media plays a large role.

We’ve been testing this a lot over the months, and even though it’s always hard to convince businesses to try this out, the results always pay off.

Having them (many profiles) + Being active on the profiles helps send signals about the entire brand presence. Even if normal human users don’t interact, for the search engine and also for the AI engines the connections and freshness are very important for proving the business is real and active. You also learned a lot about this yesterday, during Day 9 of the journey.

Sometimes, what the AIs recommend are completely from the social media profiles (including Instagram — some say instagram doesn’t get crawled, which is a lie. Many instagram citations can be found). So missing out on social media profiles might lose an important place where information about the services and business provided lives.

Yes, we’ve seen it happen many times: some brands only get AI citations related to content from their social media presence and the AIs only send visitors to their social media profiles (so traffic could only be seen by the platforms).

These are valuable, because you still get your brand across and it still becomes the recommended brand.

What else we’ve seen: a few weeks of citations only from their social media, but then ChatGPT starting to display the sites of the brands, instead of solely their social profiles.

So even if there won’t be a focus of getting many human eyes on the content there (not everybody needs to be an influencer), it will be best to have at least 3 active social profiles, in order to make the connections happen.

For Day 10:

make sure you have at least 3 social media profilesif you don’t yet have 3,
keep creating more
each social media profile needs to have a link in bio back to the main site
the main site (sometimes, the only site you have as a small business) needs to have clear links in the footer or in the body of the homepage towards those social media profiles
think about entities like brand name, important people in your business, personal brands, authors you may have, services, products, names in the portfolio, locations you serve. Make a list.
go and see if you had at least 6 social media posts in the last 14 days about those entities
create fresh content and publish it today