If you’re trying to market your product or service online, you can’t ignore the statistics.
- In 2019, 90.4 percent of millennials, 77.5 percent of Gen X, and 48.2 percent of baby boomers were active on social media.
- 54 percent of social browsers use social media to research products.
- Each person spends an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day on social networks and messaging.
Think your prospects and customers are in those statistics? If so, it might be time to rethink leaving your social media marketing to change.
What is social media optimization?
Social media optimization is the process of using various social media accounts for scaling your business’s online presence. Instead of creating profiles on all the various social media platforms and posting to each occasionally, social media optimization takes a different approach.
Instead, you need to strategically build your online marketing plan to connect and engage with your prospects on a deeper level. It means crafting a well thought out social media strategy that strengthens your brand, generates more qualified traffic, and gets more visibility in areas with people who want to do business with you.
As a company, it allows you to focus on the social media accounts that will help you stand out, and become a stronger, more visible player in your field.
I already do SEO, why is social media optimization important too?
While SEO focuses more on the content on your website, social media optimization strategizes the content you place on your social media accounts. The two are separate, yet work together. It’s about creating a cohesive presence no matter where a person finds you online.
If you’ve tried and failed at creating social media accounts before, it might be that you’ve never had a deep understanding of what people really want on the social media account you’re posting to.
One survey found that the three most common reasons people unfollow brands is because:
- They post too much self promotion
- They aren’t personal engaged and rely on too many automated messages
- Improper use of hashtags
If you aren’t tracking your statistics, if you don’t know what people want on the social media account you’re participating in, chances are you aren’t using it to the best of its intentions.
Social media accounts are the communication to your followers and potential fans. If you make this a meaningless process, you’ll never get the results you’re looking for.
Social media optimization tips that help you grow
So what’s a marketer to do when trying to grow a business online? Pay attention to these social media optimization strategies, and you’ll see growth in whatever profiles you choose.
Optimize your strategy
It may seem easy to snap a photo and share it on Instagram, or put a few words up on Twitter and call it a day. But without an effective strategy, people will have no reason to follow what you do.
Take a look at your own profile. Would you follow you? Or do you meet one of the reasons people unfollow brands from above?
Create clear goals and objectives for why you’re using a social media account. While you should select social media tools that have prospects you’re looking at attracting, you should also choose platforms that meet your own qualifications, and give you a reason to stay actively engaged. A few hundred followers on Instagram would be better for your brand than thousands of Twitter followers, where you hate posting regularly.
Keyword research
Before you start conversations, it’s important to understand what keywords to use in your conversations. Just like keyword research is essential for SEO work on your website, you’ll use keyword strategies when you’re developing content for your social media accounts.
Keyword research helps you identify hashtags, and locate other users on the platform that are complementary and potential collaborators with what you do. People use hashtags to link and find out more about their interests. It’s how people move around. Without a proper keyword strategy, you’re, in effect, talking to no one.
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Profile optimization
When you search for brands or people, have you noticed many of the top ten ranks in Google are back to social media accounts? That makes it imperative that you optimize your social media profile to ensure you come up under search terms.
Consider your company or brand’s profile to be the pillar of your social media optimization strategy. Pay attention to your:
- Profile picture – people want to know who they’re doing business with. The brand should match across platforms, and be instantly recognizable as they move between them.
- Username – consistency across all social platforms is key to building your brand.
- Bio – most people put in a few words and call it done. This is a big mistake. Use this to speak directly to your visitors, and don’t ignore the fact that your bio content can also help you rank in search.
Uniformity is key across all platforms, using the same colors, photos, graphics, and content.
Content optimization
Remember how we talk about content being king throughout the articles we write? Well the same is true on your social media platforms too.
The content you place in the feed of your social media account will not succeed if it isn’t personable and on target. In general, content comes in two formats:
- Content you create yourself
- Content you curate from others
Ideally, you would have a healthy mix of the two, depending on how you work your strategy. Find other relevant content that targets the same audience. Quality matters above quantity. When your target audience sees you, it’s crucial they understand what you’re sharing and why.
Schedule
We recommend starting small and growing as it becomes a part of your daily routine. Try posting once a week, then moving to once a day. Calendar it. There are many tools that can help you input content and have it released timely based on your needs.
Analytics
If you don’t track your results, you won’t understand what’s working and what’s not.
Use Google Analytics to determine how much traffic you’re sending to each web page you promote. This can also help you evaluate what content your audience is excited about, and give you areas of expansion.
You can also use social media analytics to determine how well each post does. Most accounts have their own internal programs that allow you to look at your content in a variety of ways.
Don’t forget your hashtags. This is one of the easiest ways to see how quickly you gain traction in the keywords that matter to you.
Have you used social media optimization before?
