The world of social media marketing is complex and exciting, but it follows specific rules every business should adhere to. Discover how to make the most of your brand’s social media profiles.
Social media presents an unrivalled opportunity for extremely effective, cost-efficient marketing campaigns. That’s why today, almost half of the world’s population is active on various platforms. Brands race to tap into that marketplace and gain an extensive number of engaged followers.
These circumstances are making different social media platforms a highly competitive environment – maintaining a mere presence on the networks is no longer sufficient.
Enter social media optimisation, or SMO.
A vital factor in online marketing, it’s the process of determining the content that performs the best within a particular niche and employing it consistently.
Those who focus their attention on SMO can quickly see significant benefits, starting from greater brand awareness to consistent sales. With the staggering number of potential customers available on social networks, the positive results can significantly impact every business, including your own.
However, the matter is by no means easy and requires a significant amount of effort. But several key actions will help you pinpoint your target audience throughout various networks and start marketing to them more efficiently.
Here are some of the crucial tips for improving your SMO and leveraging the immense potential of social media.
Seven Tips to Successful SMO
Tip #1. Nail Down Keyword Research
Like in search engine optimisation (SEO), keywords also play an essential role in SMO.
Proper keyword research is vital when it comes to reaching your target audience. The main points of focus here are the terms, hashtags, and topics your potential customers use when searching for information related to your niche. Once you understand this aspect, you can start driving their searches towards your brand.
It’s worth mentioning that people don’t use the same keywords for their social media searches as the usual Google searches. Because of that, you should be aware of the keywords specific to the platform you’re researching.
As is the case with SEO keyword research, being thorough is paramount. Explore the main keywords as well as the semantic and long-tail ones.
It’s also useful to understand how your competition approaches the matter and see if you can redirect some of the search results from their pages to yours.
Tip #2. Choose the Right Platforms
The different social media platforms your audience will frequent and engage with depend largely on their demographics, interests, and needs. Similarly, your offer might be better suited for marketing on specific platforms – the same product or service that attracts attention on LinkedIn won’t be equally efficient on Instagram.
The reason for this difference in effectiveness is quite apparent. Some platforms, like Facebook, are intended primarily for personal interactions. Others, like Pinterest, focus more on leisure and hobbies, while sites like Stack Exchange or LinkedIn are more work-related.
To determine which platform would prove the most effective for your marketing campaign, you’ll need to develop a thorough understanding of your target audience.
Are the people you’re targeting looking for work or employed? What is their average age, social, and marital status? What are their shared interests, if any, that relate to your brand?
Answering these questions will help you decide on the social media platform that best fits your goals. There’s no need to be present on every platform all the time. However, you should choose one or several that will be the main focus of your campaign.
Tip #3. Use Visual Content
We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this concept applies to SMO as well. That’s why visual content is more likely to grab users’ attention than walls of text when they scroll through an endless supply of new posts.
In fact, some of the more prominent networks, such as Instagram and Pinterest, are almost exclusively based on visual content. But other sites now recognise both the need and the potential behind images and video content.
For some time now, Facebook and Twitter have had full support for various types of visuals. The former streams around 100 million hours of video material daily, while the latter has well over a billion videos viewed every day. Images and photos have long ago become a staple of both platforms but are just as effective today. And according to recent statistics, tweets featuring images have a significantly higher number of clicks, likes, and retweets than purely textual ones.
The point is straightforward – visual content is much better optimised for social media, and your strategy will greatly benefit if you can successfully incorporate images and video.
Another aspect worth your attention is the titles and tags for your images. If you can create appropriate tags, your images will appear more often in Google Image Search results.
Finally, visual content can be an excellent tool for engaging users and followers. Besides their comments and reactions, some brands have resorted to posting images and videos created by their users through various challenges and competitions.
Tip #4. Have Consistent Handles and Hashtags
If you plan on managing several profiles on different social media networks, it’s imperative to use a consistent username or handle on each. While only one or two platforms might be the main focus of your campaign, people looking for your profile on other sites should be able to reach it quickly.
But having consistency doesn’t end there. While you also need to apply it to your hashtags, you get more leeway because here.
Hashtags are, in essence, a tool for optimising searches on social networks. As an element native to these platforms, well-versed users employ hashtags to find topics that interest them quickly. This element is integral to certain platforms and your campaign could significantly improve if you start using hashtags.
The most interesting aspect of using hashtags is that people might not be searching for your business, yet they could end up on your brand’s profile. This makes choosing the right hashtag a strategic decision.
Similar to keywords, hashtags require thorough research. The best source of relevant information in that regard is prominent influencers and currently trending content.
Keep in mind that hashtags rarely remain relevant for a long time, so your strategy will need constant updating. However, it will allow you to reach a wider circle of people, potentially generating more leads.
Different networks use specific hashtags, so the ones you use must be optimised for the platform of your choice. For example, Twitter uses hashtags for searches, as they group various tweets under a common subject, and the most successful posts on this platform have only one or two.
Instagram, on the other hand, groups images using hashtags. Here, the number is much higher than Twitter, and one post can have between 11 and 30 hashtags.
Tip #5. Use a Consistent Posting Schedule
The most successful influencers on social media platforms all have one thing in common: they made a posting schedule and maintained it for a long time. This rule applies to brand profiles and marketing campaigns even more since your brand awareness, sales, and longevity could depend on consistency.
The first thing to consider when creating your posting schedule is timing.
If you want your audience to be fully engaged with your content, you should determine the right time to publish your posts. Knowing the habits and lifestyles of your target audience is crucial in that regard, as is understanding the specific platform you’re using.
The same goes for posting frequency.
Sites like YouTube aren’t well suited for publishing posts several times a day, while Instagram or Facebook are perfect for just that. Whatever posting frequency you decide on, don’t change it unless necessary.
You don’t have to maintain an overly strict schedule when it comes to images or textual posts. However, your video material should come out at approximately the same time. Pre-recorded videos can be uploaded within an hour before or after, but live streams should be right on time.
Tip #6. Optimise Between Original and Curated Content
Your content will naturally be optimised to fit your audience and their interests best. But when publishing content, you shouldn’t rely exclusively on original creations. Nor should your posts consist only of third-party content.
Finding the ideal mix of both types is the best way to optimise your social media content, especially when it comes to visuals. Brands that rely on sharing viral videos too much can quickly fall out of the audience’s good graces, but entirely relinquishing such a powerful tool wouldn’t be very beneficial either.
On the other hand, continually producing original content is challenging and can become quite costly. The most considerable risk in that regard is the decline in quality that might come with the pressure of regularly publishing new material. Also, tapping into a piece of content that’s currently trending is a great way to stir up your posts.
Tip #7. Keep Track of Your Campaign
Once you put the various social media profiles into motion, you should constantly monitor your campaign across every network. This will give you valuable insight into how the campaign’s performing and if you’re getting the expected audience engagement and feedback.
Chances are, your marketing campaign won’t be perfect from the get-go and some adjustments will be necessary. That’s why monitoring the number of likes, shares, comments, and other interactions is crucial.
When you compare those metrics with the number of conversions on your website, you’ll have a clear guideline regarding your future tactic.
This approach is similar to any other marketing campaign – you start from a certain point, monitor the results, and update your strategy accordingly. But in SMO, it’s vital to act as quickly as possible with the updates, as the dynamic of social networks is rather fast and lively.
Optimise and Let the Networks Go to Work for You
The marketing potential of social media networks is immense. If you know how to structure your business profiles correctly and set them up on the right platforms, there’s no limit to how far your brand can reach.
This challenging marketplace is very specific but can be extremely rewarding once you get a firm grip on its mechanisms. Of course, content optimisation and your overall strategy are parts of the equation. Ultimately, those will all rely on the quaflity of your content.
If you want to ensure only the best visuals get published on your feed, Automation Agency can create the most enticing imaging for your profile.
Our Concierge Service will help you handle the visual content for your SMO. If you’d like to know more about the various tasks that we can perform to boost your company’s online presence, visit this link and discover all the services we offer.
