Social media is undoubtedly the best way to help advance your business. With over 4.5 billion people active on social media and many people using it as the primary mode of marketing for their brands, now is a good time to redirect a considerable part of your marketing resources in digital marketing.
But due to the ever-increasing competition and multiple and constant changes in the social media algorithms, it has become rather difficult to make your brand visible on social media. To do this, you should upload relevant content and have a strong social media optimization strategy which is where most brands tend to go wrong while strategizing their social media marketing plans. Almost none of them put enough effort into social media optimization. You cannot achieve the desired results or even build a relevant community unless you properly optimize your brand image or social media profiles,
With so much competition in the commercial as well as the social scene, it has become a prerequisite to optimize every word that you write in order to get the best results. Social media optimization has a lot of scope to make your brand a prominent one in the market, irrespective of its niche.
What is Social Media Optimization?
Social media optimization is the process of making use of social media as a platform to improve your business’s online presence. Some companies think that simply creating profiles on all social media platforms is enough for a strong digital presence, SMO provides a completely different perspective.
A well-planned strategy can help you strengthen the brand, generate stronger leads, get more visibility digitally, and connect with your audience.
As a company, you need to put effort into using social media techniques, that will help you stand out and make an impression online. The right strategy will upgrade your social media performance and become more visible.
10 SMO techniques that are really effective
For effective social media marketing, you need to balance your search engine optimization and social media optimization. This way, you create a healthy and overall foolproof online marketing strategy. To adopt a strong strategy, you can use the following social media optimization techniques to strengthen your online presence:
1. Strategy Optimization
A lack of proper social media marketing strategy has been a longstanding problem for many companies as this lack of strategy is one of the top reasons brands might fall behind in the social media world. To achieve that to maximum efficiency, you need a social media optimization strategy with a fixed goal and objectives.
When you have a clear strategy ready for application, you will direct your attention to the specific issue and make necessary improvements, consequentially improving your efficiency.
2. Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important things that are needed for SEO. It is all about finding the words and phrases that will help you rank on search engines. When you know what your target market is looking for, you can create content based on those results, helping you in the form of content marketing.
Keyword research will also enable you to identify industry-driven hashtags to use within your content. If people are looking for some specific hashtags, in particular, that match with the products or services that you offer, then you will naturally want to appear in those searches. If you want to know how many people are searching for it and which keywords could be the most important to your brand, the best thing that you can do is use multiple SEO tools to find the best tags.
3. Profile Optimization
One of the most effective social media marketing tips is optimizing your social media profiles. Creating a profile might seem like a very simple task, but it is one of the most common areas where businesses make mistakes with respect to their social media optimization strategy.
You must treat your company’s page as the central pillar of your strategy. If it is not strong enough, your entire SMO strategy will easily fall apart.
Keep these points in mind while creating a profile:
- Profile picture– The first thing that a user always checks is the profile picture even before looking at the name. make sure that your profile picture is the company’s logo to establish brand identity and start company recognition and association as soon as possible.
- Bio– Many people pay much attention to what they put up on their bio, which is one of the biggest mistakes they can make. Clearly mention what your company does. Ideally, you must be having a website so you would also want to redirect users to your business’s website. Mention your website URL in the bio section as well.
- Username– Usernames are one thing that you should stay the same. Consistency across all social profiles will make sure the user finds your profile easily. Also, your username should be directly related to your brand and must not look too unprofessional or ameture.
4. Use Existent Influences
It is difficult but not impossible for startups to establish themselves in the digital market, especially if you are just beginning. Even with an incredible social media marketing strategy, it can take a lot of effort. This is when you can take help from some influencers, asking for their help to enhance your social profiles. You must go for niche-oriented influencers and bloggers to get reviews and mentions and ensure that your brand voice is heard.
5. Content Optimization
Subpar website content cannot help you succeed when it comes to social media marketing. If you think carefully, there are two main types of content that are posted on social media:
- Fresh content that you produce from the scratch
- Curated content that you obtain from other, existing resources
Ideally, you would need a mix of the two. For best results and high engagement, make sure that both, your curated and the original content are relevant to the audience. Quality is much more important than quantity is so instead of just compiling loads of information in one place, figure out what the audience wants and give them that exact thing.
6. Fixed Posting Schedule
Posting timings have a strong effect on the engagement that your posts receive. However, the most effective time to do this is different for different groups of audiences. The best time very much depends on your audience.
Apart from the time you upload, you should also focus on the frequency at which you post. It is best if you track when you get the maximum reach and post on those timings because you would neither want to overdo it with a dozen posts a day, nor do you want them to forget about you by not posting for days on end. According to research, you can follow the following:
- Facebook: 3-10 posts per week
- Twitter: 5+ posts per day
- LinkedIn: 2-5 posts per week
- Pinterest: 5-10 posts per day
7. Social Media Analytics
Tracking your SMO is crucial, as it explains how well the current strategy is working for you. Aside from tracking the traffic, you need to constantly check your social media metrics which will indicate the engagement on all posts. Every social media platform has a different set of metrics to track engagement, such as likes, shares, retweets, comments, etc.
8. Test Headlines
When you post on any of your social media platforms, you are not just uploading a random post. A lot goes behind a viral tweet or a highly shared Instagram reel. You need a catchy headline and an engaging fresh caption.
Your headlines should be captivating enough to get attention almost instantly. Make sure to use a variety of headlines so that it does not get boring or repetitive. You can even set different headlines for multiple social media platforms.
9. Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags are as integral as the content itself, especially when it comes to SMO techniques. Irrespective of the platforms you use, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others, all have hashtag integrations in some form or the other. Hashtags help make your content much better and increase visibility. They make the content easy to track and segregate.
Hashtags optimize your social media presence by helping your posts to reach a greater audience, even if it might seem random. You can make your hashtags and collect them to save to reuse later.
10. Engaging visuals and text
A lot of text without visuals will prove to be very bad for your social media profile which is why you need to improve your brand’s image on social media by creating engaging content like memes, tutorials, videos, infographics, and other such things that your audience would be willing to share.
When it comes to the content, you need to make sure that you garner a positive reaction from your audience. Make sure that your content is visually appealing.
Social media optimization can completely transform how you approach your marketing strategies. We are living in a digital era of marketing where you can never know enough. So if you wish to learn about content optimization in-depth, you can join a digital marketing institute. They have professionals who hold years of experience in this field and can provide you with effective digital marketing tips which can be very beneficial if you are interested in choosing this as a career path