With over 4 billion people active on social media and even more using it as the primary medium for marketing their brands, now is the time to invest a considerable part of your marketing resources in digital marketing. 

Undoubtedly, social media is the best way to market your business. Unfortunately, due to the increased competition and multiple changes in the social media algorithms, it is becoming increasingly difficult to put your brand out there on social media. Today, you have to put out relevant content and have a strong social media optimization strategy in place.

Most brands tend to make huge mistakes while setting social media marketing plans. Almost all of them do not make enough efforts for social media optimization. Without properly optimizing your brand image or social media profiles, you cannot achieve the required results or even build a relevant community.

With so many companies and even more profiles in the market, it is essential to optimize every word you write to drive the best results. Developing a social media optimization strategy that aligns with your brand and helps you achieve your community target is the one that will drive more sales and conversions for your businesses. 

Social media optimization has many potentials to make your brand a prominent placeholder in the market, no matter what the niche is. However, having the right strategies in place is the only way to get there. No shortcuts, no workarounds. 

This article talks about social media optimization and the best practices to integrate into your marketing plan. From Facebook to LinkedIn, let’s see what social media optimization techniques you can use to make your brand stand out.

What is Social Media Optimization?

Social media optimization is the process of using social media as a medium to scale your business’s online presence. Whereas some companies think that only creating profiles on all social media mediums is enough for a robust digital side, SMO provides an entirely different outlook. 

With social medium optimization, you need to strategically build your marketing plan to connect on a deeper level with the target audience. 

A well-thought-out social media optimization strategy can help you; strengthen the brand, generate stronger leads, get more visibility in the digital world, and connect with the audience/ community. 

As a company, you need to focus on using social media techniques, which are helping you stand out and make an imprint on the online world. The right social media optimization strategy will improve your social media performance and become more visible in the industry. 

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Why is Social Media Optimization Important?

According to a report by Hubspot, 21% of the consumers will unfollow a brand on social media due to repetitive content, and 19% of the consumers will unfollow due to frequent posting. Other reasons include frequent posting, too much clutter, and lack of engagement on the posts. 

Therefore, social media marketers must track engagement on all social profiles to determine how useful and relevant their content is and how much the audience can relate to it. 

The current world that we live in prioritizes consumer experiences and their conversations more than anything, which is why you should think before investing your budget in meaningless tasks. 

Social media optimization will ensure that you are putting your money in all the right places, which will turntables at the right time and provide you with performance improvement. 

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10 Social Media Optimization Techniques That Really Matter

For effective social media marketing, you need to balance between Seach engine optimization and social media optimization. This way, you create a healthy and overall solid online marketing strategy. 

To adopt a strong strategy, here are the top social media optimization techniques that you can use to strengthen your online presence:

1. Strategy Optimization

A lack of an effective social media strategy has been quite the hurdle for some time for companies. The lack of strategy is one of the top reasons brands might fall behind in the social media world. 

Around 28% of the businesses feel that the shortage of a strong strategy is the main reason that is stopping them from turning into a social enterprise. To do that perfectly, you need a social media optimization strategy with a fixed goal and objectives. An ideal strategy will focus on growth and measurable results. 

When you have a strategy on paper, you will stand out and make necessary improvements. 

2. Keyword Research 

Out of all the things you require for SEO, keyword research is one of the most important ones. Keyword research is all about finding the words and phrases that will help you rank on search engines. When you know what your target market is searching for, you can create content based on those results which can be checked with keyword popularity tool. 

Keyword research will also enable you to identify industry-relevant hashtags to use within the content. Here’s an example, let’s say you run a store that deals in organic food products. People searching for #OrganicWholeFoods or other such hashtags are more likely to be your customers than others. 

So naturally, you want to appear in such searches. But how would you know how many people are searching for it and which ones would be the most important to your brand? The answer is simple, use multiple SEO tools to find the best ones! 

3. Profile Optimization

For search engine optimization, one of the essential things is optimizing your social media profiles. Creating a profile might seem like a pretty easy task, but it is one of the most common areas where businesses fall short on their social media optimization strategy. 

Consider as if your company’s page is the central pillar of your strategy. If it is not concrete, your entire social media optimization strategy will fall apart. 

Here are a few pointers that will help you out while creating a winning profile:

• Profile picture: A user would always check out the image before moving on to the name. Ensure that your profile picture has the company’s logo to build brand identity and start company recognition at the earliest. 
• Username: Usernames are one thing that you should be consistent about. Consistency across all social profiles will enable a user to find your brand’s profile easily. 
• Bio: Many people don’t care about what they put up on their bio, which is honestly one of the biggest mistakes they can make. State clearly what your company does with focus keywords integrated into the text. You also want to redirect users to your business’s website; therefore, include a CTA link.

As soon as you have a social media optimization strategy in place, dedicate a chunk of your time to set up profiles. Here are Neil Patel’s social media profiles for inspiration. 

The uniformity across all Neil Patel’s profiles makes it very easy to find him!

4. Use Existent Influences 

It is challenging for startups to make a place in the digital market, especially if you are just starting. Even if you have an incredible social media marketing strategy, it might take a whole lot of effort. 

This is where you should consider taking help from some industry influencers and asking them to help you optimize your social profiles. Choose niche-specific influencers and bloggers to get reviews and mentions and ensure that your brand voice is heard. 

5. Content Optimization

You cant succeed in social media marketing if you have subpar content on your website. There are two main types of content that you put on social media:

• Original content that your team produces
• Curated content that you take from other resources

In an ideal social media optimization world, you need a mix of the two. 

Original content is the content you produce yourself, and it can include relevant infographics, texts, reports, pictures, and other such things. 

For example, Pandora’s #VoicesOfPandora was a part of their Valentine’s Day campaign, and they created original content around the idea and graphics to make this campaign a success. 

Curated content is the exact opposite of this concept, extracted from the content already present on the internet. 

For best results and high engagement, make sure that both the curated and the original content is relevant to the audience. Quality is ten times more important than quantity is. Figure out what the audience wants and give them that exact thing. 

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6. Concrete Posting Schedule 

Posting timings have a significant effect on the engagement of the posts. However, the optimal time is different for different groups of audiences. The best time is highly dependent on the audience. 

Apart from the time to post, you should also focus on the frequencies of the posting. It is best if you track when you get the maximum reach and post on those timings. 

You don’t want to bombard your followers with a million posts a day, and you don’t want them to forget about you either by not posting for days on end. According to a research by constant contact:

• 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 Social Media Optimization is essential, as it explains how well your strategy is working out. You can use Google Analytics to track the URLs using Bit.ly.  

Aside from tracking the traffic, you need to keep an eye on the social media metrics. This would show you the engagement on all posts. 

All social media platforms have different metrics to track engagement, such as likes, shares, retweets, comments, etc. 

Social Champ enables you to track all platform-centric metrics using easy-to-read graphs and charts. 

All reports can also be converted to PDF reports with white labeling options. 

8. Test Headlines

When you post on social media networks, you are not just putting up a random post. A lot goes behind a viral tweet or a highly shared Facebook post. You need an optimal design with a catchy headline and an engaging crisp caption. 

Your headlines should be stunning enough to capture attention almost instantly. Make sure that you use a variety of headlines so that it does not get boring or repetitive. Use a fresh one for each post, or set a few that you recycle at all times. 

Similarly, you can set different headlines for multiple social media platforms so that you don’t post the same thing thousand times in a row. 

Here are some examples of a catchy yet straightforward headline. 

9. Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are as crucial as the content itself, especially when it comes to social media optimization techniques. No matter what the platform is, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others, all have their hashtag integrations in some form or the other. 

Hashtags honestly make the content so much better and increase visibility. They make the content easy to track and categorize. And let’s face it, they are quite fun to use. 

Hashtags optimize your social media by enabling your posts to reach a greater audience, even if they seem random. Use Hashtag Manager by Social Champ to find industry-specific and relevant hashtags. You can also make your hashtags and group them to save in the composer to reuse later. 

10. Engaging Visuals And Text

Too much text and no visuals will kill your social media profile faster than a bullet. This is why you need to strengthen your brand’s image on social media by creating useful content that other channels would be willing to share. 

You need to make sure that your audience will react positively to the content. Use highly engaging content, such as memes, tutorials, videos, infographics, and other such things. Ensuring that your content is visually appealing will provide one of the best social media optimation techniques. Here are a few techniques that will make a difference:

• Include user-generated content to portray your work and get free content, which can be shared within the page. 
• Use hashtags to increase engagement, but make sure you don’t overuse them and clutter your posts. 
•  Create live streams for the highest levels of engagement.

Try to include a featured image in all your blog posts, which are easily shareable on all social media platforms automatically. 

Wrapping Up

Social media optimization can completely change the way you approach your marketing strategies. Next time you plan a marketing strategy, make sure that you include social media optimization in your plan!

Start taking a strategic approach to your social media posting and see the results!