All brands seek a devoted and enthralled social media audience. What makes you think they wouldn’t? It’s a low-cost method of promoting products and raising brand awareness. Building a huge social media following, on the other hand is challenging. It’s also not enough to simply be present on a platform. SMO (social media optimization) comes into play here. It’s a plan for enhancing contact and, as a result, broadening the reach of your company’s message.
According to a poll conducted by Hootsuite, there are 3.499 billion active social media users globally.You have the potential to connect with active users, but you must improve your social media to accomplish so. This makes social media a prime place to market your business at. But that is not possible without a key understanding of its landscape.
What is Social Media Optimization?
The process of leveraging social media to grow your company’s online presence is known as social media optimization. While some businesses believe that simply creating profiles on all social media platforms is sufficient for a strong digital presence, SMO offers a completely different perspective.
With social media optimization, you must deliberately develop your marketing plan to interact with your target audience on a deeper level.
A well-thought-out social media optimization strategy can assist you in strengthening your brand, generating more leads, increasing your digital presence, and connecting with your audience/community.
As a business, you should concentrate on utilizing social media strategies that will help you stand out and leave an impression in the online world. Your social media performance will increase and you will become more visible in the business if you use the correct social media optimization plan.
The connection between social media and search
It’s easy to believe that all you need to rank well in search is a speedy site with relevant meta tags and extensive content. Google’s algorithms, on the other hand, consider a variety of factors, including social media performance. The number of followers and level of engagement on social media can all be favorable indicators for Google. If you improve your social media, you’re more likely to perform well in search.
Furthermore, when you search for an individual or corporation, social media accounts may display on the first page of results. For example, if you search for “Salesforce,” you’ll get links to the company’s Wikipedia page and Twitter profile directly beneath the main website
According to a survey, 50% of businesses that struggle with SEO also don’t integrate social media marketing. Making SEO and social media work together isn’t easy. Search engine optimization and social media optimization methods are intrinsically intertwined, therefore teams must coordinate with this in mind.
Why Social Media Optimization is Important?
SMO, or Social Media Optimization, as it’s more commonly called, is the ideal marriage of search engine optimization with social media. Using social media channels and groups is utilized to raise brand or product recognition. To enhance website traffic and improve organic search results, this entails the usage of social media sites, video sites, RSS feeds, bookmarking sites, and blogging sites. The goal of methodizing social media activity is to increase the number of unique visitors to the website’s content.
SMO’s main goals include publishing material on social media and developing it in a way that encourages sharing and interaction. A Facebook sharing button on your website or an RSS feed on your blog are examples of SMO.
Below is a list that explains the importance of social media optimization:
- Ensures a Strong Online Presence
With SMO, you can assure a strong web presence for your company and establish the brand’s internet authority. It not only exposes individuals to the company but also aids branding by increasing brand awareness and recall.
- Extends the Reach
Social media optimization allows you to reach out to a certain audience. You can place the brand in front of customers on their terms thanks to the media. With mobile, video, and audio accessibility, your consumers may reach out to you from anywhere, at any time.
- Increase Traffic
Social media optimization is an excellent approach to increase the number of people who visit your website. You may reach customers all over the world via social media outlets. Furthermore, this can be accomplished without the need for further investments.
- Improves Search Engine Ranking
In conjunction with search engine optimization and search engine marketing initiatives, it is possible to improve search engine rankings by adding some SMO measures. SMO has grown in popularity among marketers since search engines began acquiring data from social media channels such as Google+ and displaying it in search results.
Businesses must maintain their content relevant and shareable to make the most of social media optimization. The more people who share the material, the higher it will rank in search engines. This will result in a strong social media presence as well as increased website traffic.
The Ideal Social Media Optimization Strategy
Social media is critical to every company’s digital content strategy‘s success. Despite this, brands of all sizes and types are not taking advantage of this tool to its full potential. Although the number of “follows,” “likes,” and “shares” is still crucial, a brand’s legitimacy is determined by much more. Today, social media necessitates a distinct set of competencies, in which organizations must completely comprehend the needs of their target audience.
- Account optimization
First and foremost, you must ensure that your brand accounts are in line with your company’s objectives. This necessitates a thorough examination of your social media profiles, with a focus on branding and marketing messaging.
When it comes to account optimization, for example, some details to consider are:
- Consistent branding and creative images for your company’s web presence (logos, fonts, hashtags, taglines, and slogans)
- A suitable link and/or call-to-action that directs visitors to the right landing page
- Languages and marketing messages that correspond to your current promotions
Consider your social media presence as a portal to your products and business. Assuming this is someone’s first interaction with your company, consistency is essential for keeping customers engaged and avoiding confusion.
Take a look at Oatly’s homepage, for example…
…as well as how their messaging, creatives, and branding are identical on Twitter and Instagram. At first sight, these accounts appear to belong to Oatly.
The creation of a consistent creative image across all social networks is an important part of Oatly’s social media optimization approach.
Account optimization ensures that your leads never feel misplaced, regardless of how they found you.
- Content strategy optimization
Businesses have a lot of options when it comes to what they can publish on social media.
However, your content strategy shouldn’t be haphazard. The sooner you have an organized method, the easier it will be to come up with ideas or posts. When you’re ready to improve your content strategy, do the following:
- Establish a regular publishing schedule and volume (including how often to post, when to post, how many needed pieces of content per week)
- Determine whatever resources you’ll need to keep your schedule full (text posts, images, videos)
- Determine which posts can be shared across networks and which must be published separately on each platform.
Keep in mind that the timing of content strategy optimization must be fine-tuned. You may discover that you need to ramp things up or scale back based on your analytics. However, having a baseline based on the ideas above can assist you in getting started.
You can use a tool like Sprout Social since it allows you to track each piece of content you publish across all of your social media channels. You can spot holes in your schedule and uncover opportunities to swiftly crosspost material if you have a comprehensive picture of your content calendar and all of your creative assets in one location.
- Link optimization
This is a component of social media optimization that is sometimes overlooked.
Businesses should not just post links on social media at random. You may more easily follow your consumers’ activity when they click through and find your best-performing social content by optimizing your links.
- To track click attribution, use UTM parameters on your social links.
- Examine which links are getting the most clicks (consider the campaigns they’re associated with and which CTAs were used).
- Check to see if you’re directing people to the right links and landing pages (think: not just a homepage, ideally)
Link optimization is crucial for determining the return on investment of your articles as well as your overall social media activities. In Sprout, which lets you set up UTM parameters and produce custom-branded links in just a few clicks, here’s an example of link shortening and tracking.
11 Top Social Media Optimization Tips & Techniques
Now getting into the meat of the discussion. Here are the tips that you can adaopt, plain and straight.
1. Be Video Friendly
Videos are the present and the future. People enjoy seeing new visual content. That is why businesses place such a high value on video marketing success: videos promote their brand and engage their followers. However, there is an art to making videos that win people’s hearts. You just have to come up with the correct video ideas: once that’s done, you’re already halfway there.
2. Participate in Groups & Start Conversations
It’s not simply about sharing content and offers on social media. It’s all about blending in and interacting with your surroundings. It will eventually hurt you if you don’t do it.
Participating in groups can assist local companies to build relationships with the community. For example, in restaurant social media marketing, it would be wise to advertise neighboring concerts, plays, parades, and other events to stay in the minds of visitors to the area. This is a textbook example of localized marketing.
Here’s how you can persuade individuals to join your Facebook group by targeting them:
- Create a giveaway that people will want to participate in.
- Backlinks to your social media profiles should be included in guest posts.
- Create Quora posts and link to them.
- Links should be included in LinkedIn profiles.
- Include backlinks in your email signature and send out emails to those who might be interested.
Above all, the more actively you engage with your audience (and community members), the better your social media optimization will be.
3. Go for Influencer Marketing
If you haven’t heard about influencer marketing yet, you should pay attention to social media trends. Influencer marketing is a great tool for increasing brand awareness and trust. Laura DeCarlo, a career counselor, told Forbes, “Consumers place their faith in their peers first and consistently have reservations about organizations. In other words, when a business says something, it’s marketing. When a peer says that, though, it is credible.”
Potential Social Media influencers are identified by SocialMediaExaminer as:
- Journalists
- Bloggers and vloggers are two types of people who use the internet to express themselves.
- Well-known individuals
- Experts and thought leaders in your field
- People who are “regular,” such as regular social media users, are developing organic online influence.
4. Show People You Know Your Stuff
People are more likely to follow a corporation that is seen as an authority in their field. As a result, demonstrate that you are an expert, and they will come back for more.
Create a company blog and focus on how-to content relating to your industry to begin. For example, if you’re a moving firm, you may write blog posts demonstrating proper packing techniques.
Don’t fall into the trap of blogging about your company without providing any useful information to the reader. Above all, you should be providing value to your customers. It’s great to promote your company, but make sure it’s not solely for promotional purposes.
5. Trust in the Power of Hashtags
Hashtags help your target audience locate you more easily. They increase brand awareness and engagement. The idea is to identify hashtags that are appropriate for your sector and company profile.
Which of these two examples is clearer and more concise?
Number two is the winner. The key to hashtags is that they should not detract from the reading of the post.
6. Know What and How Often to Post
First and foremost, if you want your posts to be engaging, you need to know what types of content your audience responds to. So, when you gather your teams and start brainstorming ideas, find out what consumers want to see from you and quantify it.
There are several misconceptions concerning the regularity with which you should post. Daily publishing is the rule of thumb for many firms, while others may just update once in a while.
The trick is to keep posting and figuring out what works best for your company.
According to a recent study by CoSchedule, you should do the following:
“The worst thing you can do is post one week and then disappear for a few months. To establish a routine, try blogging at least once a day. Also, feel free to reshare previously successful articles.”
7. Use Powerful CTAs
A call to action, also known as a CTA, leads users to the next stage in their journey.
Yes, we do require instructions.
Reading your blog, leaving a comment, liking a post, or even following your company on other social media platforms are all examples of this.
The new CTA tool on Facebook encourages users to interact with companies. This is the greatest area for digital marketing platform Mention to put their CTA button, inviting consumers to try out their app:
If you want visitors to click your CTAs like crazy, make sure the copy and design are appealing.
8. Build a Perfect Profile & Constantly Update it
Nothing wreaks havoc on your social media optimization more than out-of-date profiles. You don’t want consumers to dial the wrong number or question if your firm is still open.
Always double-check:
- Your company name is your username (to avoid confusion)
- Every social media profile has your company’s logo.
- All of your company’s data is only one or two clicks away.
- The contact information is up to date and correct.
9. Create Contests & Give Incentives
The goal of social media optimization is to increase your follower base, and offering incentives is one way to accomplish it.
Consider having a giveaway or providing a discount voucher in exchange for liking or sharing a post. People who share your content on social media increase the number of people who see it. This has been one of the most effective methods for drawing attention to social media pages.
Above all, be imaginative and make your contests or promotions as short-term as possible. No one wants to wait six months to find out whether or not they have won.
10. Be Keyword Friendly in Your Social Content
Search engine optimization is related to social media optimization (SEO). As a result, you’ll want to employ relevant keywords that characterize your business and make it easier for people to find it.
Keywords can be used in profiles, bios, and about sections, as well as in posts.
But there’s a snag.
This should be done in a natural, organic manner. Otherwise, it would appear that you are keyword stuffing, which will harm your overall SEO approach.
11. Have Quality Visual Content
If you post uninteresting stuff, no one will watch. It must be both high-quality and visually appealing. People are increasingly looking at images before reading a message. According to HubSpot, when visual and written content is combined, users retain 65 percent of the information three days later.
You can use a variety of tools to produce visually appealing material. Canva is a fantastic online graphic design and photo editing tool.
Take a look at these pointers if you want to nail your visual content:
- Ensure that your logo appears on all of your graphics.
- Share content that supports your mission statement and demonstrates your brand’s personality.
- Showcase written content with visual stuff (e.g. infographics)
- Only share relevant graphics and, if applicable, cite the authors.
The way you approach your marketing strategy might be drastically changed by social media optimization. Make sure to include social media optimization in your marketing strategy the next time you create one!
Start approaching your social media posting with a strategic mindset and see the outcomes!
Get Started With Working on Your Social Media Today
When it comes to social media, all it takes is a little bit of forethought. Experiment with different ways to find what works best for your brand and how you can give it a new look.
Be adaptable to new situations and problems as they arise. Every brand/business that wants to leave a lasting impression should use social media optimization. Boost your productivity by utilizing social media!
We know, working on optimizing your social media when you’re engrossed in your operations can be difficult. Opt for our Social Media Marketing Services that will help you win with a big smile.
