Digest...

Myth No. 1: People who love your brand on social are the best advocates.

“I hate to break it to marketers, but this is not always the case,” says Marco Hansell, CEO of social marketing platform Speakr. “Advocates can quickly become white noise if people expect them to talk about your brand every single day.”

Myth No. 2: Posting and sharing content is enough.

“Engagement is the single most important use of social media. As a brand, you not only need to share content, but you also need to engage with your audience by responding to their comments, proposing questions, and establishing a rapport with key influencers, so it's visible to your listeners,” says John Donnelly, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at social intelligence company Crimson Hexagon.

Myth No. 3: Respond to everything in social.

 “One thing that I think brands mistake in social is that they need to hop on every real-time moment, trend, or customer complaint,” Speakr's Hansell says. “While engaging with your audience is key, knowing when to engage and when to stay out is the art of thinking of your brand just like a normal person. We don't respond to everything people email us, nor do we hop into every trending topic trying to force our own relevancy into it.”

Myth No. 4: Companies must have a presence on every social channel.

Each social platform has its own posting and sharing etiquette. Users even comport themselves differently depending on the platform. So, brands should be careful and strategic when expanding their social presence.

Myth No. 5: Only professionals can create marketing content.

“No one knows customers better than customers themselves; so, why do marketers think they're the only ones who can create engaging content?” asks Marc Cowlin, senior director of content marketing at digital technology company Thismoment.

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In addition to helping your site will rank well in the search results, building links to your social profiles will help increase exposure for your company. Here are some ways to build links (both internal and external) to your social profiles.

Basic/ Digest...

Website Links to Social Profiles

If you don't already, you should definitely link to your main social profiles from your website. There are tons of different ways to do it:

• Simple text links in author bios on your blog.
• Links using small social icons in the header, footer, or sidebar of your website.
• Official follow, like, circle, and connect badges (not necessarily great from the link building aspect, but makes it easier for people to follow you).

Twitter Bio Links

While they are nofollow links, one way to create backlinks from multiple personal profiles to one main company profile is to mention the company profile in other profile bios.

Facebook Page Links on Profiles

Similar to linking a company's Twitter handle to employee's personal Twitter profiles, you can also link a company Facebook page to employee's personal Facebook profiles. Unlike Twitter profile links, these links are dofollow.

Cross-Promotion Between Profiles

Another way to build some high authority links to your social sites is to do a little cross promotion. Google+, for example, asks you for your profile links on the about tab for your profile or page. Take advantage of these to create dofollow links to your social profiles and pages.

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With new social networking platforms appearing from behind every corner, it can be hard to know exactly where to commit your time and resources.

Summarized...

1. Investment in Social Media Will Become a Necessity, Not a Luxury

2. Google+ Will Become a Major Factor

3. Image-Centric Networks Will See Huge Success

4. We’ll Witness the Rise of Micro-Video

5. Foursquare Will Decline Sharply

6. MySpace, Love it or Hate it, Will Grow

7. LinkedIn Will Become a Major Player for B2B Business Growth

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Regardless of whether you're in-house or agency-side, there are huge profits to be gained from SEO and social media teams strategically working together. Here are the top three ways to set up and benefit from this powerful collaboration.

Digest...

Tip 1: Leverage Promoted Posts to Scale Outreach and Link Building

Traditional link building can be made drastically more effective by tying in some strategic paid promotions.

As we all well know, the SEO team’s goal is to acquire more high-quality links, and the social media team’s goal is to engage the community and attract new audiences. While the goals may seem different, there is an ultimate way to achieve both.

Tip 2: Create More Effective Content

A joint brainstorming session based on solid analytics can help ensure a steady stream of killer content that works for you every time.

By working together, SEOs can benefit from the audience insights that the community manager brings, while the community manager will be appreciative of the opportunities to continuously grow and expand their audiences with a steady stream of power-packed content produced by the SEOs.

Tip 3: Engage Influencers

Encourage the social media team to build strong relationships with influencers to help with link building.

For an SEO, having strong relationships with influential bloggers or site owners can make a huge difference in link building. One or two incredibly strong links will not only make the campaign more successful but can also help with sales by sending a large number of highly qualified leads to the website.