A significant portion of social media marketing is determined by the establishment of effective partnerships. Social media is often a game of tit-for-tat, wherein influencers allow you to piggyback off of their social networks on the expectation that you will offer them comparable benefits in return. Their compensation may simply be the expansion of their social network to include new, niche markets. Or it may be something altogether different, like the exchange of services, or even just direct payment for a social media star’s role as an “influence marketer.”

Retaining the services of a social media marketing agency or a social media consultant is not only a way of managing your content production and customer engagement on social media. It is also potentially the groundwork upon which you can build partnerships with influence marketers and a number of other website owners and social media users who might turn out to be key to your online growth.

You can count on a social media company to have already established many of those partnerships for itself, for instance by connecting other clients to influence marketers, or by providing services to sites whose content may have some overlap with yours. In this way, the right choice of social media consultant can be an effective step toward the sort of tit-for-tat that allows you and a non-competing site owner to mutually boost each other’s content production, social media presence, and so on.

By just providing you with an introduction, you social media marketing agency may be able to earn you or your company a mention in somebody else’s social media feed. But with a little bit of effort, a relevant partnership can go much deeper, to include shared expertise and a steady exchange of traffic between your website and another.

If your social media consultant or internet marketing company serves clients who work in adjacent professional fields or who might otherwise share similar readerships, they ought to be able to help you come up with strategies for making sure that those readerships grow together. This could involve traditional cross-promotions like offering discounts on ecommerce purchases made after clicking through from your partner’s site. Or it could involve the creation of content for each other’s sites, to be promoted by both sets of social media accounts.

If your website includes an informational blog, there is a wealth of opportunities out there for you to both offer and receive guest posts, so that people who haven’t made their way onto your site yet can get a sense of the information that is available when they click through. On the other hand, if blogging isn’t part of your expertise, your social media consultant may have an in-house content producer who can regularly add information to your site, create links to your site from third-part blogs, and otherwise build online partnerships upon a foundation of quality writing.

All of this will serve to increase both the flow of traffic among your site and that of your emerging partners, while also increasing both the quality and the quantity of your content. And that in turn will prove to be a great boost to your site’s SEO, as well as a window into ever more comprehensive website marketing strategies.