Social Media Optimization
Complete Guide How to Optimize Social Media
you grow your company’s online reputation and presence on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. It is also about leveraging these social media sites to reach more potential customers, boost your brand awareness, and drive traffic. The end goal is to increase sales, and social media optimization can help you do this in the most cost-effective way.
What is Social Media Optimization?
Social media optimization (SMO) is the process of creating and enhancing your social media plan so that you are able to get measurable results. Social media optimization can benefit your business in more than one way. It can increase your online presence and make your brand more known. Not just that, it can also help you generate more qualified leads and improve your sales numbers.
Optimizing your social media pages makes it easy for others to trust you and get in front of your target audience. Because your goal as a business is not just to get mentioned on social media, but also get recommended or referred by others.
Why Social Media Optimization Is Important
Social media optimization is important for anyone that wants to tap into the power of social media marketing. Having a solid social media plan is extremely important if you want to build a relationship with your target audience.
Given below are a few ways it helps your business:
1. Build a Strong Web Presence
Creating a strong online presence or authority is crucial for any brand that wants to be known and trusted. With SMO, your business can build a viable web presence while helping you establish yourself as an authority in the eyes of your target audience. It gives your brand the needed visibility while educating people about the nature of your business.
2. Increases Your Reach
In order to increase your customer base and get more business, it is crucial for your business to find and connect to your niche audience. Social media is a great tool to establish a relationship with your niche audience without compromising on their preferences or likes/dislikes.
People have access to social media on the go. This makes it easy for them to connect with you through their mobile device regardless of their location.
3. Drive More Relevant Traffic
Traffic generation is an integral component of internet marketing. It doesn’t matter what stage your business is on, if you don’t have the right amount of traffic coming in, you will not see any favorable results.
SMO helps you generate relevant traffic to your website without burning a hole in your wallet. The biggest advantage being, you can use social media channels to reach out to customers on a global level. There are zero geographic limitations. And you don’t have to make a huge financial investment to do so.
4. Generate Better Leads
Generating high-quality leads can help your business in more than one way. While most businesses are using social media marketing campaigns to build a stronger brand and get the word out about their product, some of them are quietly leveraging it to gather targeted leads. Regardless of your lead generation goals, by tapping into the right social media channel, you can take your lead generation campaign to the next level.
Common Myths about Social Media Optimization
There is no doubt that social media optimization is a powerful method for businesses that want to market their products and services. However, there are some misconceptions about the application of social media marketing and the results that it can generate.
Let’s look into three common myths about social media optimization before moving forward.
1. Social Media is Free of Cost
It is a known fact that setting up an account with a major social media network such as Facebook or Instagram doesn’t cost you a penny. However, that doesn’t mean social media marketing and optimization is free. Why? Because you have to give time to make social media work for you.
Your time investment goes into researching your audience, creating the right type of content, putting in consistent effort, and optimizing your marketing campaign. And since time is equal to money, effective social media optimization is going to cost you. How much? It depends on what you want to achieve from it.
2. All Social Media Platforms Are Equal
As a business, you need to make sure that you have a presence on the right social media platforms. While it is okay to claim your business name on every major social network out there, it is important that you find out what social media platform is going to work specifically for your business.
For example, if you are a B2B business, you may benefit more by marketing to LinkedIn users rather than Facebook. You have to consider your audience and if the social media network can help you reach out to it. To make things easier and more efficient, try to focus on two to three social media platforms that go with your business and marketing goals.
3. Great Content Leads to Big Audience
It is not uncommon for a business using content marketing along with social media marketing to solely focus on creating top-notch content and nothing more. What it fails to understand is creating great content for your social media channels is only one half of the equation.
The other half or the next step is to promote this content on a consistent basis so that it reaches the right audience. You have to at least create the needed momentum or the initial push so that your social media followers can take it forward.
Make Content More Shareable
A few years ago, when social media platforms were not as popular as they are today, every social media marketer was concerned about how many users they were able to reach out to. Back then, the success of social media marketing depended on the “reach” factor. The more they reach, the better.
However, times have changed. As more and more people joined the social media bandwagon, reach became less important. Now, the most important metric that you can measure as a social media marketer is engagement.
Effectively communicating with your followers and engaging them with the right content should be the top priority of every social media marketer. For example, a study conducted by Buffer found that Tweets with images get 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets. Why? Because they’re engaging.
How Do You Optimize Social Media Marketing?
1. Be More Social on Social Media
Being social is the first step to finding success with social media marketing and optimization. While there is nothing wrong in focusing on the marketing side of things, it should not come at the expense of being active on social media.
In order to effectively optimize your social media, you need to understand the social media landscape by being a part of it. In other words, you need to participate in every possible way to make sure that you are on the right track.
Once you create a social media profile on a particular social network, don’t stop there. Spend some time following others, visiting their profiles, commenting on their content, etc. Networking is all about connecting with others by reaching out to them and starting new relationships.
Here are three simple ways to be more social:
Like Posts
When it comes to liking others’ posts, do so with a genuine purpose. Like content that deserves to be liked. Don’t limit yourself to only those with who you are trying to connect. The reason why liking works is that when you like someone’s content, they are more likely to return your favor by interacting with you on your profile. Or they could go ahead and actually initiate a relationship with you.
Comment on Posts
Social media is a great place to share your opinions and express your thoughts with people who share similar interests. By commenting on the right content and connecting with the right people, you show your target audience that you care about the issues they care about. When you comment on content by others in your niche, you not only grow your network but also stay ahead of others who are not participating.
Tap into Niche Social Networking Groups
One of the benefits of social networking is that you are able to connect with like-minded individuals by joining relevant groups. When you become a part of groups that go with your interest, formulating better relationships gets easy. You don’t have to be very active in a group, but it always helps when you post good content and contribute to it.
Last but not the least, try to tap into these groups to expand your immediate network and create connections with influencers who can help you with your marketing. Remember, the more active you are on a regular basis, the better results you will see.
2. Add Social Media Share Buttons
Social media has changed how people share information online. Today, anyone can share anything with a click of a button. This is why you are missing out if you don’t have social media share buttons on your website.
When one of your visitors finds some useful information on your web pages or blog, they should have an option to easily share content with their social media followers and friends. By making it simple to pass on content to others, the chance of getting relevant traffic and exposure goes up.
3. Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
One of the easiest things you can do as a social media marketer to increase your reach is to optimize your social media profiles.
Use Branded Cover Photos
While having a regular cover photo on your page is completely acceptable, as a business you would want your background photo to at least to have your company logo on it. It not only helps in branding but also makes sure your company looks more professional. Your aim should be to make a great first impression on anyone who likes or follows your page.
Link to Other Social Media Profiles
If you already have brand loyalists or people who love your brand following you on one social media platform, then why not get them to follow you on other platforms as well?
For instance, if you’ve just signed up for Instagram, you can inform your Facebook followers to check out your profile. However, the problem with this approach is your post may not reach everybody.
This is why it makes sense to add links to your other social media platforms within your profile so that people can easily find them. Social networks such as Pinterest and Facebook let you link out other social media profiles prominently
4. Optimize Your Social Media Content
As a business, one of your top priorities is to seek new audiences and find prospects that would be interested in your products or services. Besides helping you solidify your relationship with your existing customers, your content should also help you connect with people who aren’t familiar with your brand.
Your social media content is no different than the content on your website. This means it can not only get shared on the web through websites and blogs but can also rank high for relevant keywords in the search engines. So optimizing your social content on Google and other search engines make complete sense. Here are two ways to do so:
Use Keyword Driven Content
In order to gain more visibility in the search engines and get targeted traffic, make sure your content is optimized for the right keywords. In other words, your social media content should be designed from the ground up to rank well in the search engine result pages.
Publish Social Posts Worthy of Backlinks
Gone are the days when social media content was limited to one platform. Now you can embed social media posts everywhere. You’ll find them being used in articles, blogs, ebooks, etc.
While you are already putting in the effort to create great social media content, try to make it worthy of backlinks. Make the content valuable so that professionals from within your niche link to it. By naturally gaining backlinks to your social profiles, you increase the chances of getting ranked for valuable keywords.
Leverage the Power of Hashtags
Your social media strategy is incomplete without the right use of hashtags. They go beyond just helping you label your content. They make it easy to discover and help your message reach out to your target audience.
Hashtags are a great place to start when you’re looking for more exposure via social media. They help your social media content generate relevant audience engagement and give you the needed edge over the competition.
By incorporating the right hashtags, your social media optimization efforts give better results. Your content reaches out to more people and is found by social media users who aren’t connected to you.
Avoid Stuffing
The last thing you want to do is stuff your posts with hashtags that may or may not be relevant. Whether you are on Facebook or Instagram, you should limit the number of hashtags you add to your post. The fewer the hashtags, the better.
In order to find success with hashtags, you should try avoiding uber-popular hashtags. Why? Because most of the time these hashtags will fetch you followers who are only interested in being followed back or in spamming you.
You have to focus on using hashtags that help you connect with a niche audience that’s genuinely interested in your brand and its offering.
5. Optimize Social Media Ads
Growing your social media presence and reach “organically” works without a doubt. The only downside being, it takes time. So if you are short on time, but have the budget, then social media ads can potentially give you the best return on your investment.
When done right, paid social media ads can prove to be a cheap and effective way to reach out to your target audience. Here are two simple yet proven tips to help you optimize your social media ads and fetch you a better ROI.
Test Multiple Ad Versions
Finding out what works best for your ads is a matter of testing multiple versions. A successful social media ad is rarely the first version. Right from creating different ad copies to testing unique images, every single step you take to test various elements improves the chances of your ad being profitable.
