As a business, what is your primary goal through social media marketing? Is it simply being present or existing on the platform? Or is it about driving actual sales by increasing your reach? If the latter is what you relate with, Social Media Optimization would be the key to your brand’s success.
Most brands would kill for a social media presence that reaches the masses. They want a significant social media following to ensure more people receive their content. Now, they would naturally want this because social media marketing is one of the most cost-efficient ways to increase brand awareness and market products. What does this call for? A killer social media marketing strategy and a social media optimization strategy to go with it!
There are almost 3.5 billion active social media users across the globe. You can reach all these people, and only social media optimization can lead you to them. And if you use social media scheduler to post in advance, you increase your chances of reaching your targeted audience in time In this blog, we will guide you through the meaning of SMO, the importance of social media optimization in digital marketing, and ways to do it right for increasing sales.
What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Social Media Optimization can be explained as the practice of using social media networks to grow and manage a brand’s message and online reach. Talking about social media optimization in digital marketing, it involves increasing awareness about new products and services, creating a connection with customers, and mitigating any controversies or threatening news.
The goal of Social Media Optimization and Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is quite similar. Both aim at getting your content seen by more people.
Why is Social Media Optimization Important?
As per studies, 21 % of users would unfollow a brand on social media because of repetitive content. Another 19 % were found to have unfollowed due to very frequent posting. Hence, it is extremely important for marketers to keep a track of engagement on their content on all social media platforms.
Any social media marketer should be at pace with the engagement numbers on their content on all their social media profiles to observe how relevant their content is. The marketing space has evolved rigorously over the years and has become more customer centric than ever. So, brands have to focus on how their customers feel and how the quality of conversations between the two is.
Think about launching an expensive viral content marketing strategy and making absolutely nothing out of it. Social media optimization will help you recognize areas where you need to put your resources for the best returns on investment.
10 Social Media Optimization Tips That Your Brand Can Use
We saw how social media optimization is important for getting your brand on the customer maps. But to actually go about and around the plan, you will need a few tips under your belt.
Here are 10 tips for social media optimization:
1. Select The Right Platform
The stepping stone for your social media optimization efforts should be to choose the right platform for marketing. You must find out where your customers or prospective buyers spend their time when they are online. For their personal work, they would hang on Facebook or Instagram and for professional work they would use platforms like LinkedIn.
2. Keep Your Presence Distinctive
It is very important that your brand has a unique and distinctive personality. Make it a point to use ideas and concepts that are original and specific to your brand. Try to think beyond the usual and bring out a voice that arouses emotions in your audience. For that matter, you can use SMS marketing services to grow your social media presence.
3. Try To Create Buzz Around Your Brand By Generating News
You can roll-out news on your brand in an interesting manner by using catchy titles and quirky captions. This will surely grab the attention of your users. You can add on by creating innovative hashtags for your news pieces. Try to imbibe your own style into the news pieces and make them look distinctive.
4. Tag Users To Initiate Engagement
A very smart way to bolster engagement on your content is to tag users in your posts that can add some value to the conversation. You should be careful while doing this and not tag more people than solicited. This can be done on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn and get people involved in the content shared by you.
5. Host Contests and Giveaways
A good way to create credibility in the market is to host contests, giveaways, or polls. When you create these events, the users would know that you have a lot to offer and they will find a reason to trust your brand. Perhaps the easiest way to gain followers and conversions is this.
6. Connect with Social Media Influencers
If you know anything about influencer marketing, you would know how much it can reward you in terms of reach and engagement. So, try connecting with influencers within your industry and tag them into your posts. You can look for potential influencers whose audience can benefit you and share your content with them. If they like it, they will share it further with their users, increasing your brand’s visibility.
7. Create a Social Footprint on YouTube
You know YouTube Video Marketing can be one of the most smart and effective social media optimization tips? Making videos can be a cumbersome task but the returns are all worth it. YouTube is owned by Google and that means that Google will position your videos in the search rankings. You do not have to make complex videos; simple demonstration of product information videos would also work.
8. Ask Your Employees To Share Content From Your Brand
Social media has always been a medium for the exchange of information amongst users. The majority of the users use social media platforms for work purposes and they are more likely to connect with people they know than with brands. That is why you should encourage your employees to share content released by the brand.
9. Make Judicious Use of Hashtags
Hashtags are very effective for increasing your brand’s reach or visibility. They can up the ante of your posts most definitely. But be careful not to overdo it because people will not fancy posts that are jammed with hashtags. When you Schedule Facebook Posts or Schedule Tweets, you should put in one or two hashtags and that will do. For Instagram, less than ten hashtags are good to go with.
10. Use The Power of Visual Content
Visual content is most likely to grab a user’s attention while scrolling through a social feed. It is a very powerful social media marketing optimization tactic. The proportion of visual content should be more in your content mix. This will give you more leverage on social media platforms and increase your chances of gaining higher engagement.
Pro Tip:
Try GIFs
Adding GIFs to your social media posts will improve them and make them stand out on the timeline. A person who knows how to make a GIF can easily dominate the social media game because they are simple to find and make. Even they are inextricably linked to Internet culture. You should definitely incorporate GIFs into your social media marketing strategy to see what results from you can get.
11 Social Media Optimization Strategies For Your Brand
We served you with a few tips to get your A-game on for social media optimization. Now it is time to go through social media optimization strategies that you can use for success with social media content.
1. Analyze Your Competition
The best way to put out unique content and to optimize it would be to study the content published by your competitors. You can look at what content they are coming up with and what is liked the most by users. Then you can design content that either beats that or falls into the same area. But make sure you keep pace with your competitors.
2. Find out What Queries People Have About Your Products
If you want to optimize the answers to users’ search queries in your industry, you need to find out the most commonly asked questions about your product. Websites like Quora can help you discover common questions about your key topics or products.
3. Take Help From Experts within Your Company For FAQs
In order to find the best answers to the most commonly asked questions, you should look for them where they are being answered daily. That would be the experts within your own company. You can ask them to list down all the frequently asked questions to give you an insight into what your audience is talking about.
4. Organize a Set Amount of Hours For Social Media Work
It is very important to determine the number of hours you would want to spend on your social media efforts because if you don’t do that, you might spend a very long time paying attention to every detail. When you allocate a set amount of hours for this work, you will remain in check with your overall time goals. A social media scheduler can be very helpful here because it can automate every social media activity, saving you significant hours for strategy building.
5. Keep track of Brand Mentions and Key Terms
When you use social media scheduling tools, you can easily keep track of key terms and relevant mentions without having to be online all the time. Searches can be allocated to specific geographic locations to ensure you are aware of the local mentions and trends. For example, you can use a tweet scheduler to track all engagements and mentions on Twitter specific to your preferred filters.
6. Reuse You Best Ad Copy By Modifying It
If you have seen success with certain ads you have created through AdWords, you should try using the same or similar kind of language in your ads on social media websites. This will save you plenty of time and effort and fully proof your chances at success with post-engagement.
7. Study The Analytics of Your Social Media Profiles
One great advantage of social media content is that it is trackable and its success is measurable. You will most likely be able to track data from the platform itself, but you can also use third-party tools or social media schedulers. All you have to do is filter out the data you think would be important to you.
8. Schedule All Your Content To Publish at The Best Times
Do you know what will guarantee the best engagement on your posts? Putting it out when the audience is the most active. You can do this by scheduling all your posts ahead of time and making a consistent posting schedule. So, if you are to Schedule LinkedIn Posts or schedule Instagram posts, you can do so with an automated schedule without having to worry about anything else.
9. Use Live Video Broadcasting
Live videos have become extremely popular across various social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all seen stars arise through live videos. Through live videos, brands get a chance to reach consumers directly and create a personal appeal to them. It is an excellent way to increase engagement and boost conversations.
10. Use Facebook and Instagram Carousel Ads
Facebook and Instagram can be very resourceful platforms for creating a buzz but there is also a lot of competition to skim through. You can make an attempt to stand out by adding creative eye-catchy graphics and ad copies. On Facebook and Instagram, you have an amazing option of displaying a slideshow of images or a carousel. They look very attractive with multiple design options.
11. Sport Virtual Reality
Although still in its evolving phase, VR has managed to gain significant traction all over social media. Facebook started supporting 360-degree videos and photos in 2016. Since then, many companies have used this feature and released unique and enticing experiences online. You can use these augmented reality features to produce interactive ads for your marketing purposes.
Conclusion
Social media optimization can change the outlook of your online business entirely. It can level things up and give you an edge in the market. One important aspect of SMO is consistency in posting schedules.
Frequently Asked Questions
With the help of SMO, you can create a potent presence on the web for your business and establish an authority for your brand online. Here are the primary reasons why SMO is important for your business:
– It can increase your brand’s reach
– Solidifies your presence on the web
– Generates more leads
– Drives traffic to your website
– Ranks you up in the search results
Here are ways in which you can optimize your social media posts:
– Conduct proper keyword research
– Monitor your social media campaign
– Optimize your strategy
– Make careful use of hashtags
– Optimize your profile for better search results
– Develop a well-planned posting schedule
The one big difference between SMO and SMM is that SMO is about the modifications made on your website and on the other hand, SMM entails the activities that happen outside your website. So, we can say that SMO is a way to push SMM activities by the users of your services or website.
Social media optimization can amp up your business’s presence in the internet domain. Here are the benefits of SMO that you should know:
– Effective brand building
– Cost effective way to market your product
– Improves search rankings
– Immediate increased visibility of your brand
– Effective targeting of audience groups
It is important to understand that SMO and SEO are closely linked. Both strategies are used to improve search ranking, increase site traffic, further popularity, and hence success of your digital marketing efforts. Both have to be combined and used to run an online business successfully. Only one of them will not be much good, both need to be blended cautiously to get complete benefit.
Social Media Optimization is defined as the practice of using social media networks to grow and manage a brand’s message and online reach. In the digital marketing context, SMO meaning is about creating awareness about products and services, developing a connection with customers, and dodging foul news or damaging situations.
Debbie Moran is a Digital marketing strategist with 5+ years of experience producing advertising for brands and helping leaders showcase their brand to the correct audience. She has been a part of RecurPost since 2019 and handles all the activities required to grow our brand’s online presence.