SEO
The Do’s And Don’ts Of Social Media Management

Are you looking for better ways to manage social media accounts without missing out on anything important?
Social media platforms play a vital role in our lives today. From staying connected with friends to sharing personal updates, they provide countless opportunities to connect with others.
In addition to staying informed about current events, brands can also build relationships with potential customers and grow their audience.
Social media management tools allow you to post content from multiple sources at once and schedule posts in advance. They also give you access to analytics data, allowing you to track metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and even conversions – all of which can serve as helpful guides in determining the effectiveness of specific campaigns.
These tools can also work with various platforms (i.e., Twitter and Facebook), giving you complete control over your presence across multiple mediums.
So now, let’s get into the current social media management trends for B2B and B2C brands.
Social Media Management Strategy Trends
Social media is one of the most versatile and effective marketing tools today.
We use social media to drive our branding efforts, connect with customers, generate new leads, gain insights into buying habits, manage reputation, and bolster our digital footprint.
But, while social media is an essential part of modern business, many companies still aren’t getting the full potential from their digital efforts.
As Social Media Examiner’s 2022 Social Media Marketing Industry Report reveals:
- Those new to social media marketing generally focus on Facebook (82%) and Instagram (67%). However, those who have been social media managers for more than five years have diversified across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok.
- The top two platforms that B2C marketers use are Facebook (94%) and Instagram (85%).
- The top two platforms that B2B marketers use are Facebook (85%) and LinkedIn (81%).
- Regarding organic social plans, 61% of marketers will be increasing their Instagram activity.
- Most marketers agree that they want to increase their video marketing, with 68% of marketers planning to increase their video marketing for Instagram, 67% for YouTube, and 56% for Facebook.
If this surprises you, you might want to shift your marketing efforts. Because unfortunately, most B2B and B2C businesses lack an effective strategy for social media management. You’ll have to create a strategy that moves with social media trends and help companies to understand that shift.
Now, I’ll walk you through the most important social media “Do’s” and “Don’ts.”
And at the end of this article, I’ve also included a table that recaps my main points. Feel free to print it out and use it as a reminder whenever you need to get your social media strategy back on track.
Do
1. Have A Strategy
The most important part of social media management happens before you sign up for Facebook or publish your first Tweet.
Each social media marketing campaign should start with clearly outlined goals and a battle plan that will help you achieve those goals.
Here’s the secret of an effective strategy: For a plan to be successful, it must be as specific as possible.
For example, SEJ’s Social Media Strategy breaks down tactics for dealing with the different types of platforms (photo sharing, video sharing, bookmarking, and discussion forum), and each one is specific in its aims. They refine their strategies by listing tone guidelines, posting strategies, engagement strategies, and strategies to find new followers.
Typical start-up social media management strategies will look a little different. These strategies revolve around assessing your strengths and weaknesses as a company and finding opportunities to turn your early customers into brand loyalists.
Of course, your perfect strategy won’t be a carbon copy of some other brand’s goals. So, when building your social media management strategy, set realistic goals to impact your business.
Editor’s Note: To learn more about creating a social media strategy that also incorporates SEO efforts, check out this article.
2. Choose The Best Platforms
How’s your Facebook outreach going? What about Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+? Do you have a YouTube account? What about Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr? And lest we forget, TikTok.
With so many social media platforms to choose from, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed if you don’t stay organized. The worst part is that overlooking one platform might mean missing out on a massive potential market.
Check out Shelley Walsh’s research on social media usage, marketing, and strategy.
3. Use The Right Tools
Keeping up with social media is an impossible task for us mere mortals.
Fortunately, there are some handy software options to help you manage and monitor all of your social media accounts from one central hub. Here are some of the best options:
- BuzzBundle: BuzzBundle was developed to be the ultimate social media management tool. Not only does it connect with all the biggest social media platforms, but it helps you monitor blogs, forums, and Q&A sites, too. BuzzBundle analytics gives you the insights you need to reach new customers, boost your SEO campaign, and find key influencers in your industry.
- Hootsuite: Hootsuite connects you to numerous social networks. Like BuzzBundle, Hootsuite lets you find out what your customers are saying about your brand and easily manage your outreach, thanks to a central hub for all of your social media management.
- Buffer: Social media is Buffer’s specialty. Buffer lets you post photos, videos, and posts to the most popular social media sites. It also enables you to craft posts in advance and publishes them later for maximum exposure.
- Sprout Social: Sprout Social’s platform lets you manage your social messages through a single-stream inbox. You can schedule, publish, and post content to your favorite social media sites and get valuable insights into how audiences engage with your content.
- Social Studio: Social Studio’s offering helps you engage with your customers by connecting you to different sources and can replace programs like Photoshop and Canva. With this software, you can use AI capabilities to create posts across platforms.
4. Track The Metrics That Matter
If you don’t know whether or not your social media outreach is impacting your business, then what’s the point? When you’ve defined a goal for your social media campaign, gathering corresponding metrics is the only way to tell if it succeeded.
Here are some metrics that might indicate success:
- If your goal is to expand your reach, measure the engagement and new followers.
- If your goal is to grow brand awareness, measure shares and influencers mentioning your brand.
- If your goal is to get more sales, measure referrals, CTR, and conversions.
The tools listed above will give you a lot of insights into the metrics you need to measure the success of your campaign.
5. Engage And Post Regularly
Last but not least, the point of a social network is to socialize. So, share great content regularly to give your followers something to share and get excited about.
Don’t forget to engage with their content, too. Make sure to follow the industry leaders in your niche and try to give more than you receive.
To ensure you keep up with social media, consider setting a schedule for yourself. Even 10 minutes spent sharing and engaging daily goes a long way toward boosting your web presence.
Don’t
1. Try To Please Everyone
Understanding your audience is one of the most critical parts of your strategy. If you try to please everyone, you’ll offer nothing unique, and nobody will be satisfied.
On the other hand, if you know your audience and understand their pain points, you can tailor your services to solve their specific problems.
Do that better than any of your competitors, and you’ll have a loyal following in no time.
2. Delete Negative Reviews
When you see every mention of your brand, it can be tempting to purge negative experiences from the web. Resist that urge.
Instead, reach out to people who leave a negative review. Ask how you can improve their experience and work hard to regain their trust. Doing this may not only salvage a bad situation but also show other potential leads how far you’re willing to go for your customers.
Responding to both positive and negative reviews is a helpful way to gain insight into your business and target market.
3. Lose Your Personal Touch
Automation may be the only way to keep up with all the bustling social spheres, but that’s no excuse to lose the human element in your brand.
That means posting new content for every demographic, no matter where they fall in your sales funnel. Keep your messaging personal, targeted, and bursting with your brand’s unique personality.
On this note, make sure that your outreach always feels organic. Don’t make the mistake of befriending every follower and spamming inane posts.
On the flip side, don’t be a hermit who only posts and promotes their content. Instead, share content you truly love and connect with people whose insights you value.
4. Become Complacent
Finding your audience on all the bustling social media platforms and watching them respond enthusiastically whenever you post new content isn’t enough. So, the best social media strategists plan ahead – and they’re always experimenting.
The truth is that social media management is never done. There’s always a better way to reach your target audience, a new platform waiting to be discovered, and more avenues for you to engage with your customers.
Stay ahead of the curve and never let your current strategy be “good enough.”
5. Neglect Your Audience
Disengaging is one of the worst social media sins. Don’t neglect one network in favor of another or leave comments and questions from a genuinely engaged audience unanswered.
If you need to go on a hiatus, use social media to inform your followers – they’ll value the communication.
Final Takeaways
Social media management can be overwhelming if you aren’t careful. However, countless platforms, apps, and tools are available today to help you manage your accounts and eliminate some of the unnecessary stress.
If you focus on these simple “do’s” and “don’ts,” you’ll be able to create an effective and streamlined social media management strategy for any brand.
To recap, here are the top “dos” and “don’ts” when it comes to social media management:
More Resources:
Featured Image: Red Fox studio/Shutterstock
SEO
A Year Of AI Developments From OpenAI

Today, ChatGPT celebrates one year since its launch in research preview.
Try talking with ChatGPT, our new AI system which is optimized for dialogue. Your feedback will help us improve it. https://t.co/sHDm57g3Kr
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 30, 2022
From its humble beginnings, ChatGPT has continually pushed the boundaries of what we perceive as possible with generative AI for almost any task.
a year ago tonight we were probably just sitting around the office putting the finishing touches on chatgpt before the next morning’s launch.
what a year it’s been…
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 30, 2023
In this article, we take a journey through the past year, highlighting the significant milestones and updates that have shaped ChatGPT into the versatile and powerful tool it is today.
a year ago tonight we were placing bets on how many total users we’d get by sunday
20k, 80k, 250k… i jokingly said “8B”.
little did we know… https://t.co/8YtO8GbLPy— rapha gontijo lopes (@rapha_gl) November 30, 2023
ChatGPT: From Research Preview To Customizable GPTs
This story unfolds over the course of nearly a year, beginning on November 30, when OpenAI announced the launch of its research preview of ChatGPT.
As users began to offer feedback, improvements began to arrive.
Before the holiday, on December 15, 2022, ChatGPT received general performance enhancements and new features for managing conversation history.

As the calendar turned to January 9, 2023, ChatGPT saw improvements in factuality, and a notable feature was added to halt response generation mid-conversation, addressing user feedback and enhancing control.
Just a few weeks later, on January 30, the model was further upgraded for enhanced factuality and mathematical capabilities, broadening its scope of expertise.
February 2023 was a landmark month. On February 9, ChatGPT Plus was introduced, bringing new features and a faster ‘Turbo’ version to Plus users.
This was followed closely on February 13 with updates to the free plan’s performance and the international availability of ChatGPT Plus, featuring a faster version for Plus users.
March 14, 2023, marked a pivotal moment with the introduction of GPT-4 to ChatGPT Plus subscribers.


This new model featured advanced reasoning, complex instruction handling, and increased creativity.
Less than ten days later, on March 23, experimental AI plugins, including browsing and Code Interpreter capabilities, were made available to selected users.
On May 3, users gained the ability to turn off chat history and export data.
Plus users received early access to experimental web browsing and third-party plugins on May 12.
On May 24, the iOS app expanded to more countries with new features like shared links, Bing web browsing, and the option to turn off chat history on iOS.
June and July 2023 were filled with updates enhancing mobile app experiences and introducing new features.
The mobile app was updated with browsing features on June 22, and the browsing feature itself underwent temporary removal for improvements on July 3.
The Code Interpreter feature rolled out in beta to Plus users on July 6.
Plus customers enjoyed increased message limits for GPT-4 from July 19, and custom instructions became available in beta to Plus users the next day.
July 25 saw the Android version of the ChatGPT app launch in selected countries.
As summer progressed, August 3 brought several small updates enhancing the user experience.
Custom instructions were extended to free users in most regions by August 21.
The month concluded with the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise on August 28, offering advanced features and security for enterprise users.
Entering autumn, September 11 witnessed limited language support in the web interface.
Voice and image input capabilities in beta were introduced on September 25, further expanding ChatGPT’s interactive abilities.
An updated version of web browsing rolled out to Plus users on September 27.
The fourth quarter of 2023 began with integrating DALL·E 3 in beta on October 16, allowing for image generation from text prompts.
The browsing feature moved out of beta for Plus and Enterprise users on October 17.
Customizable versions of ChatGPT, called GPTs, were introduced for specific tasks on November 6 at OpenAI’s DevDay.


On November 21, the voice feature in ChatGPT was made available to all users, rounding off a year of significant advancements and broadening the horizons of AI interaction.
And here, we have ChatGPT today, with a sidebar full of GPTs.


Looking Ahead: What’s Next For ChatGPT
The past year has been a testament to continuous innovation, but it is merely the prologue to a future rich with potential.
The upcoming year promises incremental improvements and leaps in AI capabilities, user experience, and integrative technologies that could redefine our interaction with digital assistants.
With a community of users and developers growing stronger and more diverse, the evolution of ChatGPT is poised to surpass expectations and challenge the boundaries of today’s AI landscape.
As we step into this next chapter, the possibilities are as limitless as generative AI continues to advance.
Featured image: photosince/Shutterstock
SEO
Is AI Going To E-E-A-T Your Experience For Breakfast? The LinkedIn Example

Are LinkedIn’s collaborative articles part of SEO strategies nowadays?
More to the point, should they be?
The search landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, blurring the lines between search engines and where searches occur.
Following the explosive adoption of AI in content marketing and the most recent Google HCU, core, and spam updates, we’re looking at a very different picture now in search versus 12 months ago.
User-generated and community-led content seems to be met with renewed favourability by the algorithm (theoretically, mirroring what people reward, too).
LinkedIn’s freshly launched “collaborative articles” seem to be a perfect sign of our times: content that combines authority (thanks to LinkedIn’s authority), AI-generated content, and user-generated content.
What could go wrong?
In this article, we’ll cover:
- What are “collaborative articles” on LinkedIn?
- Why am I discussing them in the context of SEO?
- The main issues with collaborative articles.
- How is Google treating them?
- How they can impact your organic performance.
What Are LinkedIn Collaborative Articles?
First launched in March 2023, LinkedIn says about collaborative articles:
“These articles begin as AI-powered conversation starters, developed with our editorial team, but they aren’t complete without insights from our members. A select group of experts have been invited to contribute their own ideas, examples and experiences within the articles.“
Essentially, each of these articles starts as a collection of AI-generated answers to FAQs/prompts around any given topic. Under each of these sections, community members can add their own perspectives, insights, and advice.
What’s in it for contributors? To earn, ultimately, a “Top Voice” badge on their profile.
The articles are indexable and are all placed under the same folder (https://www.linkedin.com/advice/).
They look like this:

On the left-hand side, there are always FAQs relevant to the topic answered by AI.
On the right-hand side is where the contributions by community members get posted. Users can react to each contribution in the same way as to any LinkedIn post on their feed.
How Easy Is It To Contribute And Earn A Badge For Your Insights?
Pretty easy.
I first got invited to contribute on September 19, 2023 – though I had already found a way to contribute a few weeks before this.


My notifications included updates from connections who had contributed to an article.
By clicking on these, I was transferred to the article and was able to contribute to it, too (as well as additional articles, linked at the bottom).
I wanted to test how hard it was to earn a Top SEO Voice badge. Eight article contributions later (around three to four hours of my time), I had earned three.


How? Apparently, simply by earning likes for my contributions.
A Mix Of Brilliance, Fuzzy Editorial Rules, And Weird Uncle Bob
Collaborative articles sound great in principle – a win-win for both sides.
- LinkedIn struck a bullseye: creating and scaling content (theoretically) oozing with E-E-A-T, with minimal investment.
- Users benefit from building their personal brand (and their company’s) for a fragment of the effort and cost this usually takes. The smartest ones complement their on-site content strategy with this off-site golden ticket.
What isn’t clear from LinkedIn’s Help Center is what this editorial mix of AI and human input looks like.
Things like:
- How much involvement do the editors have before the topic is put to the community?
- Are they only determining and refining the prompts?
- Are they editing the AI-generated responses?
- More importantly, what involvement (if any) do they have after they unleash the original AI-generated piece into the world?
- And more.
I think of this content like weird Uncle Bob, always joining the family gatherings with his usual, unoriginal conversation starters. Only, this time, he’s come bearing gifts.
Do you engage? Or do you proceed to consume as many canapés as possible, pretending you haven’t seen him yet?
Why Am I Talking About LinkedIn Articles And SEO?
When I first posted about LinkedIn’s articles, it was the end of September. Semrush showed clear evidence of their impact and potential in Search. (Disclosure: I work for Semrush.)
Only six months after their launch, LinkedIn articles were on a visible, consistent upward trend.
- They were already driving 792.5K organic visits a month. (This was a 75% jump in August.)
- They ranked for 811,700 keywords.
- Their pages were ranking in the top 10 for 78,000 of them.
- For 123,700 of them, they appeared in a SERP feature, such as People Also Ask and Featured Snippets.
- Almost 72% of the keywords had informational intent, followed by commercial keywords (22%).
Here’s a screenshot with some of the top keywords for which these pages ranked at the top:


Now, take the page that held the Featured Snippet for competitive queries like “how to enter bios” (monthly search volume of 5,400 and keyword difficulty of 84, based on Semrush data).
It came in ahead of pages on Tom’s Hardware, Hewlett-Packard, or Reddit.


See anything weird? Even at the time of writing this post, this collaborative article had precisely zero (0) contributions.
This means a page with 100% AI-generated content (and unclear interference of human editors) was rewarded with the Featured Snippet against highly authoritative and relevant domains and pages.
A Sea Of Opportunity Or A Storm Ready To Break Out?
Let’s consider these articles in the context of Google’s guidelines for creating helpful, reliable, people-first content and its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Of particular importance here, I believe, is the most recently added “E” in “E-E-A-T,” which takes experience into account, alongside expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
For so many of these articles to have been ranking so well must mean that they were meeting the guidelines and proving helpful and reliable for content consumers.
After all, they rely on “a select group of experts to contribute their own ideas, examples and experiences within the articles,” so they must be worthy of strong organic performances, right?
Possibly. (I’ve yet to see such an example, but I want to believe somewhere in the thousands of pages these do exist).
But, based on what I’ve seen, there are too many examples of poor-quality content to justify such big rewards in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The common issues I’ve spotted:
1. Misinformation
I can’t tell how much vetting or editing there is going on behind the scenes, but the amount of misinformation in some collaborative articles is alarming. This goes for AI-generated content and community contributions alike.
I don’t really envy the task of fact-checking what LinkedIn describes as “thousands of collaborative articles on 2,500+ skills.” Still, if it’s quality and helpfulness we’re concerned with here, I’d start brewing my coffee a little stronger if I were LinkedIn.
At the moment, it feels a little too much like a free-for-all.
Here are some examples of topics like SEO or content marketing.


2. Thin Content
To a degree, some contributions seem to do nothing more than mirror the points made in the original AI-generated piece.
For example, are these contributions enough to warrant a high level of “experience” in these articles?


The irony to think that some of these contributions may have also been generated by AI…
3. Missing Information
While many examples don’t provide new or unique perspectives, some articles simply don’t provide…any perspectives at all.
This piece about analytical reasoning ranked in the top 10 for 128 keywords when I first looked into it last September (down to 80 in October).


It even held the Featured Snippet for competitive keywords like “inductive reasoning examples” for a while (5.4K monthly searches in the US), although it had no contributions on this subsection.
Most of its sections remain empty, so we’re talking about mainly AI-generated content.
Does this mean that Google really doesn’t care whether your content comes from humans or AI?
I’m not convinced.
How Have The Recent Google Updates Impacted This Content?
After August and October 2023 Google core updates (at the time of writing, the November 2023 Google core update is rolling out), the September 2023 helpful content update, and the October 2023 spam update, the performance of this section seems to be declining.
According to Semrush data:


- Organic traffic to these pages was down to 453,000 (a 43% drop from September, bringing their performance close to August levels).
- They ranked for 465,100 keywords (down by 43% MoM).
- Keywords in the Top 10 dropped by 33% (51,900 vs 78,000 in September).
- Keywords in the top 10 accounted for 161,800 visits (vs 287,200 in September, down by 44% MoM).
The LinkedIn domain doesn’t seem to have been impacted negatively overall.


Is this a sign that Google has already picked up the weaknesses in this content and has started balancing actual usefulness versus the overall domain authority that might have propelled it originally?
Will we see it declining further in the coming months? Or are there better things to come for this feature?
Should You Already Be On The Bandwagon If You’re In SEO?
I was on the side of caution before the Google algorithm updates of the past couple of months.
Now, I’d be even more hesitant to invest a substantial part of my resources towards baking this content into my strategy.
As with any other new, third-party feature (or platform – does anyone remember Threads?), it’s always a case of balancing being an early adopter with avoiding over-investment. At least while being unclear on the benefits.
Collaborative articles are a relatively fresh, experimental, external feature you have minimal control over as part of your SEO strategy.
Now, we also have signs from Google that this content may not be as “cool” as we initially thought.
This Is What I’d Do
That’s not to say it’s not worth trying some small-scale experiments.
Or, maybe, use it as part of promoting your own personal brand (but I’ve yet to see any data around the impact of the “Top Voice” badges on perceived value).
Treat this content as you would any other owned content.
- Follow Google’s guidelines.
- Add genuine value for your audience.
- Add your own unique perspective.
- Highlight gaps and misinformation.
Experience shows us that when tactics get abused, and the user experience suffers, Google eventually steps in (from guest blogging to parasite SEO, most recently).
It might make algorithmic tweaks when launching updates, launch a new system, or hand out manual actions – the point is that you don’t know how things will progress. Only LinkedIn and Google have control over that.
As things stand, I can easily see any of the below potential outcomes:
- This content becomes the AI equivalent of the content farms of the pre-Panda age, leading to Google clamping down on its search performance.
- LinkedIn’s editors stepping in more for quality control (provided LinkedIn deems the investment worthwhile).
- LinkedIn starts pushing its initiative much more to encourage participation and engagement. (This could be what makes the difference between a dead content farm and Reddit-like value.)
Anything could happen. I believe the next few months will give us a clearer picture.
What’s Next For AI And Its Role In SEO And Social Media?
When it comes to content creation, I think it’s safe to say that AI isn’t quite ready to E-E-A-T your experience for breakfast. Yet.
We can probably expect more of these kinds of movements from social media platforms and forums in the coming months, moving more toward mixing AI with human experience.
What do you think is next for LinkedIn’s collaborative articles? Let me know on LinkedIn!
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
SEO
What It Really Is & How to Build One

Building a personal brand is undeniably hard work, but it isn’t as tricky as you might think.
I spoke with two influencers—Wes Kao and Matt Diggity—for their best tips on establishing a name for yourself online.
A personal brand is how people perceive you and what you’re known for. It’s the skills, experience, and values that give you an edge over others.
Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman is one example. He helms and hosts the science/health podcast Huberman Lab, lectures at Stanford Medicine, and has earned media mentions from the likes of BBC, TIME, and more.
Andrew’s personal brand is built on his credibility and areas of expertise. Many of his posts attract thousands of likes and hundreds of comments on X and LinkedIn.
If we want to dig deeper, Maven and altMBA co-founder Wes Kao has a somewhat alternative take on the definition:
In my opinion, it’s better to reframe ‘personal branding’ into ‘personal credibility.’ Personal branding has a superficial undertone. It assumes you have your work, then you tack on an artificial layer of ‘branding’ to shape perceptions.
She suggests that personal credibility is about substance: Showing people what you do, how you think, and how you can contribute. Wes adds:
In this way, you build deeper connections with people who believe in your work—which means stronger relationships, more control, and more opportunities.
In this podcast interview snippet with Nick Bennett, SparkToro’s Amanda Natividad echoes Wes’ sentiment:
People generally don’t like the term [personal brand] because it sounds disingenuous and icky. Acknowledging the existence of your personal brand is admitting that you care what others think about you, and that you find ways to manage those expectations at scale.
Wild as it sounds, building a solid personal brand gives you more control over your life.
A strong following could:
- Expand your realm of influence, particularly in your area of expertise (i.e., be viewed as a subject matter expert).
- Boost your credibility, in turn allowing you to promote your company/product better.
- Build a loyal following independent of the company you’re working for (or if you own that company, create more positive sentiment towards it).
- Open doors to job, networking, and investment opportunities.
Chiangmai SEO conference founder Matt Diggity shares some excellent points in his Facebook post on the topic, too.


There’s no linear path to building your personal brand.
As a precursor to the below steps, let’s first talk about finding your “voice.”
Wes and Matt both emphasize the importance of staying true to yourself. That means not crafting an online persona of who you think you should be.
I try to write like how I sound in person. Talking and writing are different media, so you shouldn’t try to match the two in a literal sense, but you want to capture your overall spirit. For example, I have a hint of snark in my writing because that’s how I sound in person.
Matt echoes this sentiment:
How I talk on the internet is how I talk IRL. If I’m not having a f**king blast on my YouTube videos, I won’t do them. It has to be fun.
Keep this idea in mind as you go through the steps below.
Step 1: Position yourself
Think of yourself as a product: What are your strengths, obsessions, and areas of expertise?
If you’re well-versed in technical SEO or a seasoned entrepreneur, these might be your unique selling points.
From there, double down on something you would be excited to think, write, and talk about for years—because “it will likely take years to get to where you want to go,” says Wes.
As an (optional) next step, consider solidifying your position with a spiky POV—a term coined by Wes, and which she cautions should be used with care.
A spiky POV is not about a contrarian hot take for the sake of it. In 2023, social platforms are flooded with hot takes and generic advice. I think about respecting the intelligence of my audience and teaching them something they don’t already know. A true spiky POV is rooted in deep expertise, including recognizing the limitations and counterpoints of your idea. This builds your reputation as someone who is rigorous and worth the time to engage with.
Here’s a LinkedIn post by Wes that combines all of the above: a unique perspective backed by her personal experiences, with a takeaway for the audience too. In other words—a spiky, worthy POV.
Step 2: Start sharing publicly
You already knew this, but social media platforms are one of the best ways to get growth and build your name. It’s your chance to build your reputation in a public arena.
Wes, Amanda, and Matt each utilized a combination of online channels to promote their voice and content. It’s one of the first things you should do—because your content is really only as good as its reach.
This is the first thing I did to build a personal brand and authority in the SEO industry, and I still do it to this day…
Take an hour a week, go to SEO social media hangouts (SEO Facebook groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and go from top-to-bottom answering people’s questions.…
— Matt Diggity (@mattdiggityseo) September 27, 2023
This doesn’t mean cross-posting your content across more platforms than you can manage, of course.
Study where your target audience spends most of their time, then hone in on those platforms (ideally, stick to no more than 2-3).
In Matt’s case, his followers are primarily on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube—and that’s where his SEO-led content thrives.


If creating whole posts from scratch seems daunting, start by commenting thoughtfully in relevant online communities. Obviously, do it with heart:
This is the first thing I did to build a personal brand and authority in the SEO industry, and I still do it to this day…
Take an hour a week, go to SEO social media hangouts (SEO Facebook groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and go from top-to-bottom answering people’s questions.…
— Matt Diggity (@mattdiggityseo) September 27, 2023
Here are some simple ways to start.
LinkedIn: Contribute to a collaborative article
You might have seen these articles floating around LinkedIn—perhaps even been invited to add your insights to them.
These blog posts are similar to Wikipedia pages: LinkedIn users build on each AI-generated article with their perspectives, and readers can choose to react to these additions or engage with the content.


Here’s an example of what a contribution looks like:


Reddit: Weigh in on discussions
- Go to a relevant subreddit, e.g. r/bigSEO
- Sort by “Top” and “This Week”
- Browse the questions or discussions and offer your two cents where relevant.


Ride on trending topics
Found an interesting insight on X or someplace else? Turn it into a poll, question, or post. (Be sure to also tag and credit the author!)
Bring it all together
If some of your responses or posts get traction, repurpose those answers into new content: a blog post, video, or series of social posts.
(PSST: Learn more about my process behind curating and repurposing content for Ahrefs’ X account.)
This segues into our next and final step:
Step 3: Double down on what works
By now, you should have an idea of which topics you’re most comfortable discussing at length—and what resonates most with your target audience.
You can further maximize your reach by doubling down on the things that have brought you success. Or, more specifically, by repurposing popular content in other formats and creating more content about similar things.
For instance, we turned this popular video on how to use ChatGPT for SEO into a Twitter thread and LinkedIn post—and later, a blog post.




Wes has also done this plenty with her “eaten the bear” analogy over the years. She first wrote about it in this 2019 blog post, rewrote it in 2023, and shares variations of the analogy on LinkedIn and X every few months.


Each time, these posts garner hundreds or thousands of likes
Too much backstory is one of the biggest killers of good stories.
Backstory scope creep is real. We’ve all been there: Long-winded, stream of conscious explanations—all in the name of “giving context.“
I’ve been guilty of it myself.
The solution?
Minimum viable backstory pic.twitter.com/XFe2wAJysg
— Wes Kao 🏛 (@wes_kao) October 3, 2023
Don’t let your success die there, though. You can find more content ideas that will resonate with your audience by doing some keyword research around your topic. Here’s how:
- Plug your target topic into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Go to the Matching terms report
For example, if we enter “chatgpt seo,” we see that people are searching for ChatGPT prompts for SEO and ChatGPT SEO extensions:


Given how our audience is interested in ChatGPT and SEO, these would be great topics to create content about—whether that be social media posts, videos, blog posts, or something else.
If you don’t have a paid account with us, you can plug your topic into our free keyword generator tool to view related phrases/questions.
Extra tips to build your personal brand
We mentioned some of these in some shape or form earlier, but they’re worth expanding on.
Maintain human connections
Who are you without the people who consume your content? Engage consistently with your followers and others’ content. Human connections are worth their weight in gold when you’re trying to get your personal brand off the ground.
Maintain consistency across your social media profiles
This means using the same profile picture across all platforms, and a standardized bio so others can quickly get a sense of who you are and what you often post about.
Jack Appleby is a great example. The creator/consultant is behind Future Social, an independent social strategy newsletter with 56,000+ subscribers.
Notice how he maintains consistency on X and LinkedIn:




Ahrefs’ Tim Soulo further explains the importance of your profile picture in personal branding here:
Your profile pic is your “personal branding” tool. (duh!)
My journey so far:
2009 – “I have no idea what I’m doing;“
2014 – I want to stand out & be memorable;
2018 – I want to look provocative;
2020 – I want to look professional.I can expand this into a thread if you want 😉 pic.twitter.com/W7FtZTcYGO
— Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 (@timsoulo) September 14, 2020
Be yourself
Remember how Wes and Matt shared the importance of staying true to yourself? We couldn’t emphasize that enough.
Final thoughts
These steps aren’t exhaustive, obviously. To truly stand out online, Wes suggests having a combination of these things: social proof, good design sense, strong writing, interesting insights, and a track record of contribution.
As she puts it:
All these things will make people think, ‘This person knows their craft.’
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