Social media has grown massively in the past decade giving marketers the possibility to reach their consumers with different digital marketing strategies. One of the best strategies used is Social Media Optimization (SMO). What is it all about and how can you use it to grow your online presence? Stick with us. We will give you the best-recommended tips for your business.
What Is Social Media Optimization?
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is an approach of using social media networks to manage and grow your business’s online presence. It is a method of finding out which content performs well in social media and attempting to achieve the same success.
Why do you need SMO?
Social media optimization (SMO) and search engine optimization (SEO) used to be treated as separate entities before. However, having a strong social presence on social media platforms can help you get high rankings in search engines. In fact, it was found that half of all companies that are striving to succeed in SEO are the ones that do not use social media marketing techniques. SEO and SMO are stronger when you work on them together.
Although they are not exactly the same, there are a lot of tips you can take from SEO that can help you optimize your social media. We are outlining the best 7 tips that we found that can really help your SMO. Read on to find out more.
Best tips to use to improve your SMO
1. Define your goals and objectives
The first and most important step is to design a social media strategy for your company. Most of the time, the most fundamental step for companies is often omitted or ill-thought-out. Recent studies found that a large sum of 28% of brands lack some sort of strategy. So, in order to optimize your social media presence, you need to have clearly defined goals and objectives.
How can you create a Social media optimization strategy for your business? Firstly, you should commit to focusing on growing your social presence and secondly, the results should be measurable. In this way, you can analyze and compare what works best for you. Here is a step-by-step procedure on how to define your goals and objectives and create a social strategy:
- Make sure your defined goals defined will solve challenges faced by your company
- Urge your employees to participate in sharing branded content on social media.
- Concentrate on a social media platform that can help you add value to your online presence.
- Produce engaging content (More on this later)
- Identify Business opportunities via social networks
- Try to follow up on comments, messages, and requests.
- Keep track and improve your efforts using proper analytic tools.
Having a documented social strategy for your business will help you measure and compare your improvements.
2. Analyze your audience
When looking to optimize your social presence, it is not essential to be on every social platform available. It is important however that you choose the right platform to help you get the best results.
For example, certain customers will use Pinterest or Instagram for their personal interests. Yet, if they are using social media for work, they are more likely to be found on social sites like LinkedIn or Stack Exchange. A study by the Content Marketing Institute found that 66% of marketing personnel found that LinkedIn was actually the most effective B2B social media network.
So, in the end, it is all about understanding which audience you want to target and examine which social platforms they use the most.
3. Perform Keyword Research
Once you know your target audience the next step is to perform keyword research. Keyword research means being able to pinpoint which phrases, hashtags and topics your target audience would search for in social media. When you know this, you can create relevant content for them. This is basically the same approach that is done in SEO.
Knowing what keywords users use can help you write more relevant social posts. This will help you be found by the right audience who are more likely to be interested in your brand.
Imagine you sell beauty products, and you want to promote your latest product using CBD. People posting or searching using a hashtag such as #CBD or #beautyCBD are more inclined to be your targeted audience. So, typically you would like your social media posts to appear in these types of searches. It takes some time to know which keywords are most important for your brand. Luckily, there are a lot of tools that take care of this for you.
If you want to target more social media keyword research, you can use tools like Twitter Keyword report by Sprout Social. All you have to do is create initial keywords and then the tool will produce the keyword volume for your phrases over time. Focusing on keywords that have the highest volume will place your social media posts on the top.
4. Optimize your Social Profile
Once your post has been discovered, your page will most likely be browsed by an interested audience. You need to give a good impression so that the user will be more likely to follow you and see more of your content. It is important to complete your profile with all the relevant information. Here are the main things to look out for when optimizing your social profile:
Profile photo
As a business, your profile photo should be your company logo. As a freelancer or consultant, you can consider using a portrait of yourself.
Username
Use your company name as your username. Some social media platforms like Instagram allow you to add some text alongside your username. An example would be using Gain Changer | Automation SEO. In this way, we use our company name alongside a short description of what we do.
Bio
You need to explicitly state what your company does. This is where you can place a trackable link to your website to gain more traffic. Make sure to use the targeted keywords in your bio so that your page can appear in the right searches.
5. Make your content engaging
Making your content more visually appealing is one of the best strategies for making your content engaging. The more you use visual content such as images, videos, live feeds, and GIFs, the more your post will perform better. According to a study by Buffer, Tweets that have images are clicked on 18% more, have 89% more likes and a whopping 150% more retweets.
Here are a few tips that can make a difference:
- Use user-generated content by your users: Portray their work. Users that know their content can be shared will be more likely to interact with your page.
- Use hashtags: On Instagram, it has been found to increase engagement by almost 13% when using hashtags in a post. Try to use but not overuse tags. For Instagram, a good rule is to use less than 10. For Facebook and Twitter, use only 2.
- Create videos and live streams: Videos and live feeds have been found to be the highest engaging factor in social media. Try to add them where possible.
6. Create a posting schedule
Did you know that the time you post could make a difference? The optimal time to post depends highly on your audience. Social Sprout has a tool to help you analyze the best times to post for your social media account.
Apart from the time to post, different social media platforms have the best optimal frequencies to post. Randing from 3-10 times per week for Facebook and a whopping 5-10 times a day for Pinterest. For more info see here.
7. Use Social Media Analytics
Tracking your SMO attempts is important. There are several tools that offer this service. You can also use Google Analytics by using shortened URLs such as Bit.ly. Shortened URLs allow you to keep track of your website traffic and detect from which social media it originated.
Avinash Kaushik states that there are 4 social media metrics you should consider. Mainly they ask the question: Do users enjoy what you share? The metrics include Conversion rate: the average number of comments your post gets; Amplification: the average shares your post gets; Applause: the average number of likes, and finally; Economic value: your ROI from social media. For more information, see here.
8. Perform Competitive Analysis
So after all this, how do you perform against other competitors? To know this, you need to make use of certain tools. A great tool is the Alexa Content Exploration tool. You can use this tool to detect which of your competitors are performing better in user engagement. Alternatively, you can also detect which posts on your social media are not gaining attraction.
Final thoughts and Recommendations
Having a strong social reach is essential if you want an online presence for your company. Make sure you to apply these social media optimization techniques and you will drastically improve your results.
Veteran content writer with focus on Technology and SEO.
