In short
- What social does do
- Confirm that you exist and are active. That is not a citation, but it is not nothing either.
- What weighs more
- A thread where someone else recommends you. You cannot publish that, only earn it.
- The hard boundary
- You join in under your own name. A recommendation posing as a customer is the most expensive mistake in this chapter.
Which kinds of source does an engine fetch, and what does each mean?
Eleven kinds, each saying something different about what is happening to you. The second column is not what the source is but what it means when the engine fetches precisely that one — that is the question you can act on.
What stands out when you read the list: the sources where you publish yourself sit almost entirely at the bottom in weight. The top consists of places where others write about you, which is exactly the reverse order of most marketing plans.
| Kind of source | What it means when the engine fetches it |
|---|---|
| A thread where people recommend things to each other weighs heavily, and it is not yours. You can only join it under your own name. | |
| wikipedia | The strongest entity source there is, and the only one you may not edit about yourself. What is there gets carried over. |
| youtube | Often not your channel but that of someone explaining your product. The description underneath counts for more than the video. |
| review | The count matters less than the spread and the reply underneath. A run of perfect scores in one week reads as a pattern. |
| gids | A sector or business directory. Boring, free, and surprisingly often the source of your address and opening hours. |
| vergelijker | Where the shortlist is made. Missing here means missing from every comparative question about your category. |
| vacature | Says something about your company you would never write yourself: how big you are and what you invest in. |
| forum | A specialist forum outweighs everything else combined in niche categories, and it is almost never on marketing's radar. |
| social | Rarely cited directly, often read as confirmation that you exist and are active. |
| nieuws | One article in a trade outlet outweighs ten of your own blog posts, and it is the one thing you cannot write yourself. |
| overheid | A register or official publication. The slowest to reach and the hardest to contradict. |
So how does a social post work its way through?
By two detours. A post picked up by a trade outlet or a blog comes back into view through that source — there it is no longer your post but their article. And a profile consistently saying the same as your site makes the whole more credible: two independent places asserting the same thing is exactly what a verification step looks for.
May I join a forum discussion about my own product?
Yes, under your own name and stating that it is your product. That is not a politeness rule but the only form that holds: a recommendation later recognised as coming from the provider does more damage than the mention ever produced — for the thread, for the platform and for you.
So we never write a contribution posing as someone else, not even on request, and that is not a house rule but a boundary in the code. What we do is point at the thread, prepare the text, and attach the condition that it goes out under your name.
On which channel is my time best spent?
On the channel where your buyers ask each other questions, and that is almost never the channel with the most followers. For one category it is a trade forum with four hundred members, for another a question-and-answer site, for a third the review page of a marketplace.
That channel can be deduced from the measurement itself: look at the sources under the answer you were missing from. That list differs per question and is never what you expected.
Frequently asked questions
So should I stop posting?
No, but do stop expecting it to lead directly to mentions. Social channels do different work: they keep you known among people who already know you and they supply the material others can write about. Expect confirmation from it, not citation.
Do you measure what is said about me on social channels?
What is public we count; figures behind a login require you to connect the account. And one boundary belongs here plainly: forums and discussion platforms we read broadly and not exhaustively — that needs a dedicated connector which does not exist yet. That is stated as such in our own overview of what stays dark.
Read on
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