Almost every brand is turning towards social media as it is the most cost-effective way to increase brand awareness and market your products or services. However, just being present on social media alone is never going to be helpful if you don’t know how to optimize it or maintain it. Optimizing your social media handles is extremely important for increasing engagement and reach for your business.
According to recent surveys, there are 3,499 billion active social media users worldwide. In order to reach these users, it is necessary to optimize your social media handles. In this blog, we will discuss what social media optimization (SMO) is and also explain the five steps to social media optimization.
What Is SMO?
SMO stands for social media optimization and involves analyzing and figuring out which type of content performs the best on your social media handles. The goal of SMO is to increase your brand visibility and brand awareness to gain more leads and conversions for your business.
To perform effective SMO, you have to figure out the kind of content your audience is looking for and also make sure if it fits into the social media sphere. Optimizing your social media campaigns is helpful for creating, building and maximizing your social media plan to connect even better with your audience.
Elements of a Successful Social Media Profile:
Display Name
It is fairly a very basic element but is also a crucial part of your social media profile. Your display name is the name that your audience recognizes you as on social media profiles. Your display name can be different from your actual name. It can be something closely related to your industry that can help people recognize you and your business.
Username and URL
Usually, your username is used in the URL of your website. Your username is often different from your display name and it is not possible to change your username. That’s why you have to be very careful while you are choosing your username. It is always suggested to go by your real name, as that helps add credibility to your business.
Bio and the Position of Your Link
Your bio is just a brief about yourself or your business where you can add your keywords. It is like an elevator pitch that you can use to give a short description and make an amazing first impression. You can also include your website link in your bio for people to click and get navigated on your landing page. This will help in increasing the visibility of your website.
Make sure that you get your link on the main page of your social media profiles such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Place your website link on your social media page in such a way that it is front-and-center of your profile so that viewers and audiences can easily find it.
Privacy Settings
After you are all set with your profile setup – i.e. your profile picture, cover picture and bio – you should check the privacy settings of your profile. If it is more of a business account, it is recommended to keep everything public, as your customers or audiences must be looking for all the relevant information. Your privacy settings should allow your profile to be more viewable.
Activity
Once your privacy settings are correct, you need to make sure that you have a healthy level of activity on your main social media networks. It is important to share your interests and engage with more followers and friends. Be a part of various social media groups that are relevant to your target audience.
Promotions
Never forget to mention your social media profiles on your website, business cards and email signatures. It is very important to promote your social media profiles as this helps your potential audience to find you and follow you. Make sure that you interlink all your social media profiles with each other.
Now that you’ve perfected your profile, let’s get into the process of optimization.
5 Steps to Social Media Optimization:
1. Analyze Your Audience
You have to analyze the type of audience that you want to reach out to and determine the social media platform your audience is present on. Choosing the right platform is always a good idea to connect and engage with the kind of people you are looking to target.
2. Competitive Analysis
The next step is to perform a competitive analysis. It is important to know the kind of content that is working on various social media platforms for your competitors. Competitive analysis helps in getting an overview of the kind of content that you need to produce and deliver on the various social media platforms where your audience is present.
3. Build a Strategy
Your next step is to build a strategy that will be fruitful for your brand. Whether you choose to do this alone, in-house or work with a team of social media experts is entirely your call.
4. Execute the strategy
Once you’ve built your strategy, you have to execute it. Without execution, a strategy is nothing. For the best results, your strategy should be launched by SEO experts and content marketers who will work closely with social media and community managers to execute the SMO strategy. As SMO is closely related to SEO, these teams need to work closely with each other to ensure that your brand messaging is similar across all platforms.
5. Analyze the Results
Once the strategy has been executed, it is necessary to tap into and analyze the results. Analysis of the results is essential for adjusting the new requisites for your social media campaign.
Now that you’ve optimized your profiles, let’s look at more ways to take them to the next level.
A Few More Tips To Improve Your SMO Strategy
Optimize Your Strategy
With social media evolving and changing, your strategy has to grow along with it. You have to have clear objectives and goals for running a successful campaign. You should be sure of what you want to accomplish, whether it’s to increase your brand exposure or earn more leads and conversions. As mentioned earlier, while in the process of optimizing your strategy, you have to be very careful about choosing the right social media platforms where the audience relevant to your business can be found.
Conduct Keyword Research
You have to have a thorough understanding of the kinds of keywords that your audience uses for searches that bring them to your website. Keyword research for SMO is a little different, as it involves researching the keywords that are used on social media, not on the web.
One of the most popular ways of researching your keywords is through Twitter’s Keyword Report. This feature helps you to track keywords that your audience might use for making relevant searches. This enables you to have a good idea of which keywords have a higher volume of interest. You can use those keywords for social media as well as include them in your content.
Post Original Content
Once you are done with your keyword research, you have to start crafting your content. Content is a very powerful tool to bring more people to your social media profiles and increase your followers. You can share two types of content on your social media platforms: original content or link to content on other sites. Make sure that your content is relevant to what your target audience is searching for. If you find content from other websites that is relevant to your audience, you can share it on your profile and ask your audience to comment or share their thoughts. This is a great way to interact with your audience.
When posting your original content, you should always remember to include pictures, as visual elements help to keep your audience engaged.
Solidify Your Posting Schedule
There are various tools available that help schedule your posts on social media. This saves you from logging into your various social media profiles multiple times a day. Make use of such tools and ensure you are scheduling all your posts for the times when your target audience is active.
Monitor Your Campaign
To identify which method is more effective, you need to regularly monitor your social media campaigns. Social media has various analytics tools that are extremely beneficial in determining which kinds of content are garnering more interest from your audience. You can monitor several metrics, such as impressions, clicks and engagement, and all these, in turn, help you figure out which strategy is best for your campaign.