Who doesn’t crave a better social media performance? As a social media manager, you must have put much thought into different ways to improve it.
Social media optimization is all you need to drive better results like more impressions for your posts, higher engagement with your target audience, and expanded reach. But it’s often ignored by many social media marketers because it seems complicated.
We’re going to make it pretty straightforward for you, with easy-to-apply strategies and some useful tools that can help you get your brand’s social media optimized.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in!
Social media optimization refers to techniques that help you enhance your social media content and accounts to consequently improve your organic social media performance in terms of reach, engagement, ranking, and more.
SMO can help brands and businesses stay on top of the social media game and make the most of their social selling efforts.
Since social media algorithms are changing constantly, having a social media optimization strategy can prove to be life-saving for your brand’s social growth. That’s because it will keep you focused on the latest best practices for social networks and motivated to monitor your performance and adjust your tactics when your metrics start to drop.
Let’s get specific. Including social media optimization in digital marketing strategies offers some serious benefits for your business. We shall highlight the main — and most desirable — ones:
- Better ranking in social media search results, thus increased brand awareness
- Higher reach and post impressions in your audience’s feed, thus more chances for engagement
- More profile views, thus higher traffic to your website
- Organic promotion, thus cost-efficient marketing
- Improved social engagement, thus better social signals for SEO.
Before proceeding with our juicy social media optimization tips and strategies, we feel the need to distinguish SMO and SMM, which is a very common misconception of beginner social media marketers.
Go on!
Optimizing social media for business accounts is challenging. That’s why you should find yourself some allies, a.k.a. helpful tools that can do the heavy lifting for you. These are our recommendations, which can save you lots of time and effort.
You can manage to create some quality content, even if you don’t have a graphic designer on your team. Here are some tools to help you with different types of content:
- Canva: Excellent multipurpose designing tool, easy to use, without any prior experience needed.
- Adobe Spark: All-in-one photo and video editor available on web and mobile versions with access to templates, designing assets, and a royalty-free photo selection.
- Animoto: Great drag ’n’ drop video maker, ideal for small businesses and marketing agencies.
Social listening is essential to have a clear understanding of whether your social media optimization techniques are having results. And stay on top of social media trends as well.
You can trust a social media monitoring tool from the following:
- Mentionlytics: As a monitoring tool it can track all your social mentions and analyze them to give you detailed reports with sentiment analysis, Share of Voice, and other key insights. But you can also use Mentionlytics for scheduling your posts and have access to analytics for your whole social media performance every minute via its sophisticated dashboards.
- Sprout Social: Popular all-in-one social media tool that can help you track your performance easily and gives you access to reliable analytics.
- Cyfe: Social analytics tool that offers customizable business dashboards to monitor your performance and keep all your social media data in one place.
Get consistent with your social media posting with these scheduling tools:
- Hootsuite: Leading scheduling tool for managing all your social accounts via one platform. Plus, you can have access to Hootsuite with your Mentionlytics subscription.
- Buffer: Really efficient social media management tool for scheduling your posts that offers Chrome and WordPress integrations and a mobile app.
- Later: Popular social media tool with best-time-to-post recommendations and other great features.
SMO and SMM shouldn’t be confused, as these acronyms refer to two very different marketing terms. Basically, social media optimization (SMO) can be part of your social media marketing (SMM).
Social media marketing is a broader term that has to do with all the marketing efforts that a brand makes in all social networks, both paid and organic.
On the other hand, social media optimization is about strategic techniques that brands employ to enhance their social media performance organically.
Now that we’ve cleaned the air as to what SMO is and its advantages let’s continue to the juicy part. Buckle up as we explore some effective ways to achieve optimized social media.
Today, almost 94% of businesses use social media. It’s a massive percentage indeed. But let’s be honest. Most of them aren’t quite good in that field.
If you want to do better than this, here we’ve got you covered. Find below how to optimize social media with 6 strategies you can put into practice immediately.
1. Content Optimization for Social Media
We talk about what you post on your social channels.
First of all, social media content optimization starts with creating a posting schedule. You shouldn’t post on the fly, because that way you won’t be able to create high-quality posts and be consistent.
For this schedule, you should decide which content types and posts are better to be published in each network. You know each social media platform has its own rules. For example, TikTok is all about entertaining videos; but Twitter is not: It’s more text-oriented.
Then, you should maintain a unique brand voice through all your social channels and content pieces. For instance, you can be friendly, witty, serious, and anything that reflects your brand’s personality.
Personality is winning on social, after all! So, keep that in mind not only when you write captions for your posts but also when you create images, profile pictures, record videos, and more.
Secondly, you should include keywords and hashtags in your posts, to get your brand on the results page, when a user searches for specific terms. We’re going to analyze hashtags in the next section.
However, to find the right keywords for your niche, you can do — surprise, surprise — some keyword research. It doesn’t have to be so thorough, like for SEO purposes.
You can just take a look at your analytics and see which of your current posts are doing better than the others and spot any repeated words.
Also, you can go to your website analytics to see for which keywords it ranks higher in search engines. Those will be a good start for your social media optimization experiments!
Finally, an important aspect of content optimization that too many brands ignore: Optimize your images and graphics for each network to be the right size and appear at the best quality.
Low-quality, wrong-sized images affect negatively your online presence and hurt your brand image. Avoid it at any cost!
2. Hashtag Optimization
Hashtags are the delicious frosting to your social media cupcakes! They can increase the reach and impressions of your posts to new audiences and skyrocket your engagement rate.
Source: Instagram
Although, you should be very careful when using hashtags.
Too many of them, or irrelevant to your posts can ruin your metrics and make you look spammy. Both to your target audience and the algorithms. You don’t want that.
Pro Tip: Hashtag tracking can help you determine which hashtags are worth being included in your posts, based on their performance. Also, you can identify which of them are most relevant to your niche and the content you produce, to avoid using generic ones that damage your social media optimization efforts.
3. Conversion Optimization
The ultimate objective of your social media profiles is to turn likes into leads. That’s the essence of social media marketing. And that’s why optimizing your content and profiles for driving conversions is a top priority.
So, how do you use social media optimization for this purpose? Well, start taking notes.
First, in case you haven’t already done that when creating your account, go now to your brand’s social profiles and add at least your website’s link to your bio. Every social network has a special profile section for that.
After this basic and important fix, let’s dive deeper.
You can add a call-to-action (CTA) to your bio to attract people’s attention and make them click to see what it is. For better results, the link behind the CTA should be a dedicated landing page that nurtures their interest.
Nonetheless, CTAs aren’t only for the bio part. You can use CTAs in posts too, but make sure they’re highly relevant to the topic of your post.
Last but not least, include UTM parameters in the links you share on social. For example, when you promote your pr campaigns or digital marketing campaigns. So, you can track their performance and change them in case they aren’t doing any good.
4.Profile Optimization
Knowing how to optimize your social media profiles is absolutely fundamental. This is what will boost your overall social media performance and make your profile more visible to your target audience.
Let’s start with the basics. You should examine your profiles for any branding misalignment.
All your pictures and background images should be aligned with your logo and branding guidelines, to reflect consistency. Also, make sure that you use the same tagline across all your social accounts and that is up-to-date.
Then, fill out all your information on each social network. Pay special attention to your contact details, location, and website link so they’re all the same on all your profiles. It’s a quite simple process that many businesses fail to succeed.
Furthermore, the keyword research you already performed for optimizing your posts can also be helpful here. Use specific and targeted keywords based on your industry and interests in your profile’s description or bio to rank your profile higher on the results page.
Pro Tip: Don’t forget to include also one or two hashtags there!
Source: Instagram
Another great idea to optimize your social media profiles is to give a reason why a user should follow you. You can write it in your bio section to spark people’s interest and make them hit the follow button.
5. Timing Optimization
Timing is just as important in social media optimization as in our lives! No, we don’t exaggerate.
It’s true that figuring out when to post on social can improve all your social media metrics. So, timing optimization is actually finding when your audience is more active on each social platform and eager to engage with your content.
As we see it though, it’s more of a trial-and-error situation here.
Of course, you can find research on the best days and times to post on each social medium. But we suggest you use them as guides and conduct your own experiments to see what works best for your brand. After all, audiences differ from industry to industry.
Pro Tip: If you want to skip that trial-and-error phase, you can use our Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA), which will tell you which are the optimum days for your brand to post on each social medium, based on your social performance data — not on some generic info. Plus, SIA can give you other great advice for data-driven social media optimization.
6. Engagement Optimization
Everything that we’ve already said above falls into the engagement optimization techniques as well. Other ways to improve your social media engagement are to answer comments, engage with your followers, show you’re human, and more.
But we shouldn’t miss mentioning that your posting frequency is equally important. As with timing, you should see what works best for your brand and audience. However, you can have an idea of how often to post on social media below:
- Instagram: 2–3 times/week (for posts, not stories)
- Twitter: 1–2 times/day
- LinkedIn: 1 time/day (no more than 5 times per week)
- Facebook: 1–2 times/day
That’s all! Now you know how to optimize social media profiles and content for getting your maximum performance.
The importance of social media optimization is obvious, but unfortunately, most brands don’t give much attention to it.
Don’t make the same mistake. We understand that SMO takes effort, but we guarantee it’s worth your time. Start taking care of it today.
Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/social-media-optimization
https://medium.com/@mentionlytics/from-likes-to-leads-best-social-media-optimization-strategies-in-2023-c73f9a081e55?source=tag_page———29-84——————–6684c991_0066_4f7f_b0b5_41c89a576d13——-17
