While many businesses are already on board with social media, a majority of them still fail to make small changes that could significantly enhance their performance. Social media optimization helps brands, marketers and content creators to get the most out of their social media presence. It encourages businesses to make analyze, audit and adjust both their content and profiles to stay in line with social media best practices.
Contrary to what some may think, social media optimization is not about sacrificing your creativity and brand image. This guide will break down some easy and effective social media optimization strategies to help small and larger brands scale the heights of success.
What is Social Media Optimization?
Social media optimization (SMO) is a digital marketing tactic that seeks to enhance visibility and engagement on social media platforms. Like search engine optimization (SEO) that increases your presence on search engines results pages, SMO aims to boost your presence on social media. You should view SMO as an opportunity to analyze and adjust your online presence for better performance.
Social media optimization seeks to drive quick follower growth, boost engagement and attract more clicks or conversions. It can involve various techniques and tactics that usually vary in complexity and scope. One of them is basic improvements on individual posts such as asking engaging questions on post captions or using more attractive visuals. SMO Can also involve high-level improvements such as redefining your brand’s tone of voice.
The Benefits of Social Media Optimization
Implementing the right social media optimization strategies can give your brand or business a significant boost. The following are some of the benefits that you can reap from SMO.
- Attracting more followers quickly
- A deeper understanding of your audience
- Increased brand awareness on social media
- Improved social media reach and visibility
- Improving the quality of your leads from social media
- Increased engagement rate
- Opportunities for social media commerce. It enables you to sell more of your products and services on social media
How SMO Bolsters Your Social Media Presence
With new emerging brands and several existing ones evolving, it is not easy to tell the exact number of brands competing for mindshare. However, there is no doubt thousands of brands across various industries are vying for attention on social media platforms. Social media optimization is the surefire way for brands and businesses to enhances their online presence amidst the tough competition.
SMO can bolster your social media presence in 4 main ways. They include;
- Profile optimization: Almost every visual and content element on your profile including the photo and bio can be optimized to make them easy to discover on cluttered social media platforms.
- Social SEO: Social media optimization strategies are designed to drive your content’s organic reach. Using the appropriate keywords and creating shareable content broadcasts positive social signals to search engines. That encourages them to send more traffic to your social platforms and websites.
- Audience engagement: Social media optimization dictates that brands respond quickly to comments and messages, building trust and credibility that eventually enhances your domain authority.
- Engaging, fresh content: Top-notch quality, trending content in platform-specific formats is another element of SMO. It gives a signal to Google that your brand is ahead of trends and should be promoted.
Effective Social Media Optimization Strategies
While there are various social media optimization strategies that you would want to try out, the following are proven tactics to give your brand and business the best results.
Account Optimization
One of the first steps in SMO is to make sure that your brand’s social media accounts align with your business and its goals. That will require a general audit of all your social media profiles with emphasis on marketing messaging and branding.
Some of the key details to consider when it comes to account optimization include the following;
- Branding and creative visuals that are consistent with your business or brand’s online presence. The areas to focus on should include the logos, fonts, taglines, slogans and hashtags.
- An appropriate link and or call to action that sends visitors to the proper landing pages.
- Marketing messaging and languages that align with your current promotions.
Think of your social presence as the window into your products and brand. When optimizing, assume that it is someone’s first encounter with your business. Thus, consistency counts for the sake of keeping customers engaged and potentially confusing to them.
A good example is Oatly’s homepage below.
See how their social profiles on Instagram and Twitter reflect similar messaging and branding. The accounts feel like they belong to Oatly at a glance.
Account optimization guarantees that your leads or followers will never feel lost regardless of how they find you. It is acceptable to have slightly different links, bios and promotions across different social platforms. However, you should make sure that you stick with the proper social media images sizes so every accounts looks sharp.
Content Optimization
Business are often spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing what to post on social media. However, that does not mean your strategy should be a free-for-all. As soon as you come up with an organized content strategy, you will be able to more easily generate ideas or posts. The following are steps for optimizing your content strategy.
- Create a consistent publishing frequency and volume including how often you should post content, when to post and the amount of content you need per week.
- Determine the assets that you need to fill your schedule. That may include text posts, images and videos.
- Figure out the posts that can be published across networks and those that are standalone for every platform.
Remember that you need to fine-tune the times for your content strategy optimization. Depending on your analytics, you might find that you need to speed things up or scale back. However, having a baseline that is founded on the points highlighted above can help you to get started.
This is where social media management tools can come in handy, allowing you to track every piece of content you publish on every social network. With a comprehensive view of your content calendar and all your creative assets in a single place, you can easily identify the gaps in your schedule and discover opportunities to cross post content promptly.
Social Search Optimization
Every brand today should prioritize figuring out how to optimize social media for search. Searchability is one of the fundamental elements of social media optimization since it helps you to ensure that your brand and business is easy to find online.
We are witnessing a growing trend of more social profiles coming up in Google searches. Recent updates such as Instagram’s updated search features also show highlight how brands should mind keyword usage across their social media accounts and posts.
However, all this do not mean that you should stuff your posts with keywords to boost the searchabilty of your brand on social media. Instead, begin by conducting a keyword research for industry and brand-specific keywords that you can use in your social content. Then, implement some essential social media optimization techniques such as;
- Including relevant keywords and hashtags in your social media bios
- Use consistent usernames, addresses and contact options across all your social media accounts
- Fill out and complete your bio and ‘’About’’ sections for any social network
Here is an example of how social searchability optimization works. If we search the keyword ‘’vegan haircare’’ in Instagram, we are prompted with a mix of brand, consumer and influencer accounts.
When you click through, you can see a post from oVertone appearing front and center. That is because they have optimized their bio as well as hashtags for vegan terms.
The above example demonstrates how a subtle use of keywords and hashtags can help to boost your content’s visibility. So, do not let your captions or bio spaces to remain idle.
Link optimization
Link optimization is also an essential part of social media optimization. Businesses should not just drop links at random on their social media platforms. Link optimization enables you to easily track the behaviors of your customers whenever they click through and identify your top-performing social content.
You should strive for the following;
- Set UTM parameters on your social links to track click attribution
- Assess the links that receive the most clicks (Find out the campaigns that they are tied to and the Calls to Action used)
- Make sure that you are directing people to the appropriate links and landing pages
Link optimization is fundamental to assessing the Return on Investment of your individual posts and social efforts. It helps you to understand how your audience engages with your links. Tracking your links enables you to see the posts that drive the most traffic to your site and, those that do not.
Individual Post Optimization
It is also important that you know how to optimize individual posts for effective social media optimization. However, you should keep in mind some posts require more optimization than others. For example, posts that are part of influencer campaigns will need more refining than memes or morning greetings to your followers.
Here are some pointers to remember when optimizing individual social media posts.
- Write captions that reflect the current promotions and initiatives of yoyr business
- Use appropriate hashtags, keywords and CTA phrases for every post
- Maintain a distinct tone and brand voice throughout your campaigns. Try to find a balance between personality and promotion
Check out the example below of how Razer manages to regularly roll out various campaigns and tailor every post accordingly. The following eco-friendly hype video create anticipation for the brand’s upcoming launch with a campaign-specific hashtag.
Meanwhile, here is a simple but effective giveaway post.
This element of social media optimization ensures that you address the goals of your business on a post-by-post basis. Social media testing can help you to identify the types of posts, captions, CTAs and promotions that resonate with your audience. That allows you to refine your content strategy over time.
Formulating Your Approach to SMO
The above steps can help you to establish a proper foundation for successful social media optimization. The more of these steps that you take, the more effectively you can build and scale your campaigns in the future. The tactics discussed above will ensure that you approach social media proactively and pay a close attention to the numbers that matter.
In case you are still unsure about how to approach social media optimization, do not hesitate to engage Superior Social Boost. We help brands and businesses to drive social media growth promptly and organically. We offer customized packages to enable you to boost your online presence and engagement on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube and Google Business.