Adult dating site. How can I get people to share content on facebook or google plus..

[SamCUK]

I am working on http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com an adult dating review website. I want to build a presence on social networks so have set up twitter, google plus, and a facebook page. As I understand it retweets, like, shares etc... Play a significant part in seo. Therefore I want to get as many shares etc as possible. My initial idea was to create a fan page on facebook and pay to promote it on facebook gaining likes on the fan page. Will likes on the fan page impact the main site? I would imagine not? However I can see how someone visiting the main site and liking a post would have a positive effect on rankings. The problem I've come into is facebook won't run the ads as the page is adult so they won't accept paid ads. If I add a post to the facebook page how can I get it in front of people to share or like it? Equally how can I get google plus shares? I'm new to social and am unsure of how I should proceed? Especially as facebook considers the page adult. Finally how important is social. I've read it can get short term wins and optimised posts can appear at the top of search results but don't stay there long. Link building is still the long term strategy?

[SEOMeetups]

Greetings Samuel,

Good question I would seek to create content that is not strictly adult related but more about the benefits that are possible such as happier love life, finding new relationships and create content around these ideas.  You have to play very carefully within Google+, Pinterest and Facebook as they are more than happy to shut down any accounts that get enough reports for sharing inappropriate or self promotional content.

Also Facebook will likely flag your ads for review and may not even allow you to run them so buying Facebook likes via their Advertising platform may not be an option. Content will be the long term strategy....

[josh-riley]

I think this is a good article on the benefit of social sharing: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-data-the-correlations-between-social-sharing-and-inbound-links at least from an academic POV.

Something I try to keep in mind is that it's kind of all relative. Social matters if it's where your audience is, since even though there is some SEO benefit, it's still about the end user and finding where they are.That's why you'd have a fan page, for them.  I wouldn't set up a FB page if your goal is to try to impact your main site - you may not get enough traffic to make it worthwhile and suddenly you have to manage the page, too.

I think a challenge you have is the user being comfortable having an association with adult/dating content visible or tied to their own personal social network connections. This could be a significant barrier (I am speculating; personally, this happens to be an area I wouldn't want my social network to see so I wouldn't like a dating or adult page or share any of its content). G+ isn't too different. So you'd have to look at how to position your site and content in away to overcome that.

My suggestion would be to read up more on social and the benefits to see if it fits with your audience, strategy and long term objectives. Link building is still also a good part of a SEO plan, but like anything how you go about it matters (using best practices, avoiding black hat, etc.).