As a small business, it can be pretty easy to fall into the trap of just using social media for the sake of it. You might set a goal of a tweet a day, or two Facebook posts a week, and you’ll meet this in anyway possible, even it’s just sharing a link to your brochure or contact page.
While this kind of activity isn’t necessarily negative, it’s definitely not using the power of social media to it’s full potential. Social media is a great way to drive more awareness, more traffic and more engagement to your website and blog content that can lead to actually obtaining customers.
And that’s where social media optimisation comes in.
Why social media optimisation?
It may seem a bit odd, but bear with us, we’re going to start with the why, rather than the what. In order to understand what social media optimisation is and the strategies you can use to achieve it, you have to understand why you’d want to do this in the first place.
When we’re talking about visibility in search engines, the main one most businesses are concerned about is Google. After all, Google gets 77% of all search engine traffic worldwide, so it makes sense to make it a focus. There’s been a lot of speculation over the last few years around social shares being a ranking factor – i.e. the more shares your content has, the more likely it is to rank higher in the search results.
Although correlation has been found between posts with a lot of shares and posts that rank highly in Google, this does not suggest causation, i.e. there’s no proof that the shares equaled the better ranking. It’s more likely that because the post ranked highly, more people shared it, than the other way round.
So, if someone tries to tell you that you should invest in social and social media optimisation because it’s good for SEO, that isn’t entirely true.
But, it doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. The idea behind social media optimisation is to generate engagement, awareness and traffic through the use of various social platforms. And that’s pretty much the end goal of all digital marketing.
Social media optimisation tactics
With all that in mind, what actually is social media optimisation, and what strategies can you use to achieve it?
Start with great content
As with most things in digital marketing, you should start with some great content. No one’s going to share content which isn’t useful and well-written. Think about topics that your customers and followers will find interesting and relevant to them, and write content around that. You can then follow some best practice to make them more enticing – which we’ll talk about now.
Share and share again
Once you’ve got some great content down or paper (well, screen), it’s time to share it. Increase the visibility of your content by making sure you share it across your social platforms. You can use tools like Hootsuite or Sprout to post to multiple accounts at the same time. Make sure to tailor the message and format to each social platform (we’ll go into this in more detail in a future post) and don’t be scared to share links to your content multiple times. Obviously, it’s probably not a great idea to share one post 10 times in the same day, but in order to reach more people, sharing it 4-5 times once every few days could help you see a real difference. This will also give you chance to test different messages and post formats, as well as the best day of the week and time of day to post content.
Use best practice to reel them in
There are a number of tried and tested ways to make your content more “clickable” on social media. These include:
- Using proven headline formulas and post formats (numbered lists, “how tos”, popular and relevant names and news) to make your content more attractive and relevant to followers.
- Attaching a relevant and eye-catching image to the link in your social post. This can help your post stand out amongst the busy newsfeeds on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Don’t be scared to engage
Building a network of influencers who are engaged with your content is no mean feat (again, we’ll go into this in more detail in a later post), but if you can get a group of people who are pretty much guaranteed to share content you post, this is like gold dust. If you haven’t quite reached this stage yet, try striking up conversations with influencers in your industry on their chosen social platform, and if relevant, share some of your content with them as a discussion point. Another great tactic is to specifically mention that person or maybe a post they’ve written or your post, then you can share the content with them off the back of that. Everyone loves a bit of attention, and this will increase the likelihood of them sharing your content.
Start optimising your social media output
Thinking carefully about which content you share on social media and how you share it could be the difference between modest success and absolutely smashing it. If you do it right, you could land on absolute gold mine for traffic, awareness and engagement. But, as with most things in digital marketing, it’s about trying and testing different methods and formats until you find the one that works for you. So what are you waiting for, get writing and get sharing!
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