If you are a brand running pay per click ads, did you know that your site links don’t have to link to pages on your site?  You can use them to promote your social media accounts too.

If you are working on building up a social media profile for your brand, you can set up AdWords campaigns that link to your social media accounts and you can link your sitelinks to various social media accounts too.

Grand Marnier is promoting their Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube accounts with these pay per click ads when you search on their name.  While they link to their main website with the main link on their ad, all the sitelinks are to their various social media accounts instead.

They are also running a version where the main URL is directly to their Tumblr account and doesn’t have any links that lead to their main account.

Not many people are aware that you can link to social media sites with sitelinks, as most people assume they are restricted to the usual same destination domain rule.  However, you are able to link to social media accounts, including LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest.  The only restriction is that you must use descriptive text for the sitelink such as “Watch our YouTube Video” or “[Brand] YouTube.”

Of course… just because you CAN link to your social media accounts, doesn’t neccessarily mean you should.  Aside from the issue of whether a sitelink would be more valuable for something onsite rather than promoting accounts offsite, you also need to consider what you have on those social media accounts and how well you maintain them.  Otherwise you are wasting a click to a page where users are completely disappointed by what they find and don’t engage with your brand at all.

While Grand Marnier is doing some great things by utilizing social media in their AdWords, they fall down on execution.  For example, when I clicked the link to the Grand Marnier Pinterest page, I was pretty disappointed by the lack of content – even though they had 46 pins in total, having it on only 3 boards total and one of the boards without enough pins to fill the board thumbnail gave the impression that it wasn’t something they were actively sharing on.

It doesn’t really leave the visitor with a good impression of your brand on Pinterest.

Same with their Tumblr account, their last post was November 2008, and two of the last three posts were inexplicably about McDonalds.  They could have definitely used that sitelink for something better than to a Tumblr last active 6 years ago.  And this is also one of the sites they actually use as the main link in some of their ads.  It is a pretty big fail for whoever is in charge of their social media.

Their one saving grace is fairly good Instagram account which they do regularly update and is getting a bit of engagement, and in this case should really be the only social media account they promote.  They should really take advantage of cross-posting this content if they don’t have time or desire to maintain the other social media platforms they are promoting through AdWords.

So if you plan to promote your social media links via AdWords Sitelinks, do make those platforms look good, are on topic about your brand and not something where the tumbleweeds are blowing through.  In other words, follow Grand Marniers lead in the AdWords ads themselves, but ensure your execution on any promoted social media accounts are meeting expectations.

Using social media links in AdWords sitelinks are available to all advertisers.