Did you know that over 88% of businesses market on social media these days? If this isn’t a clear indication that your business needs to be on social media, then we don’t know what is. It’s simply a must to go social but there are some essential things you need to know regarding optimising your content. In the world of marketing, they say that “content is king” and this has never been more accurate today.
As a result, you need to ensure your content is clear, engaging and powerful. But how do you do this while ensuring that your online presence is consistent? In this post, we explore several tips and tricks that you can use to optimise your content. It all starts out with setting clear goals and expectations.
1. Set clear goals
As a starting point, you shouldn’t go social just because everyone else is doing it. You need to have a clear strategy and goals in mind before embarking on optimising your social media presence. This is why it’s crucial to set aside some time and think about what you want to achieve. Do you want more followers? Are you looking for more likes and shares? Do you aim to boost your sales through social media? What type of engagement are you looking for? Having answers to these questions is the first step to ensuring that your social media content is as optimised as possible.
2. Ensure your profiles are complete
Next up, and once you’ve covered your bases with clear goals in mind, it’s time to optimise your profile. This means ensuring that every possible social media channel and the opportunities it affords you is completed as thoroughly as possible. If you have a Facebook profile, for example, you will want to fill in the “About” section, add contact numbers, images, store hours, your location and also use keywords so that the bots that crawl social media sites can find and rank you better.
3. Create valuable content
Creating valuable content is the next big step. But how do you determine what is valuable? This will ultimately depend on the business and industry that you operate within. However, some important content that you can post about and share include reports on developments and trends in the industry. These are a great way of providing valuable information to your followers. Another aspect to look out for is evoking humour and emotions. This is an essential way of boosting engagement with your audience because it will signal to them that your brand is not a stiff corporate, but rather a company with a human touch.
Furthermore, you should optimise your use of user-generated content (UGC). UGC is what your followers create and share related to your brand. This may mean engaging in a two-way relationship with them so that they feel valued and heard. Finally, it’s important to consider making your content interactive. This means making use of polls, informative infographics that can be used by your audience, providing free downloadable resources and many others.
4. Add tags and hashtags to your posts
Your post may be absolutely perfect in every way but it wouldn’t be complete for optimisation if you didn’t add tags or hashtags to it. These are the keywords that help bots classify content and they’re also the ways in which your users can find your content or valuable content more quickly. With regard to hashtags, it’s also important to understand each social media platform and its best practices. If you use Twitter, for example, one or two hashtags have proven to be the best strategy. Meanwhile, although Instagram allows for up to 30, you should limit your usage to around 11.
5. Use images and videos
We live in a visual world where we consume images and videos at a much faster rate as opposed to the written word. As a result, you need to use the right images for your brand and at the right size. You may also wish to make use of short videos because these are a crucial way of getting more exposure for your brand. From Q&As to how-to videos and everything in between including “a day in the life in your company” can really help improve the way in which your brand is perceived and achieve more visibility for your organisation as a whole.
6. Don’t forget your CTAs
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are another crucial component of your social media optimisation strategy. These CTAs require that your audience takes a certain action when engaging with your content. By omitting CTAs, your content will literally just sit there. But were you to add a powerful CTA to your content, you’d gently be guiding your audience towards taking an action. This could range from finding out more about your product or service, liking and sharing your post, downloading an important resource or even making a purchase.
7. Remain active, not passive
You may think that once you’ve posted your content, that’s all that’s left to it. This would be an incorrect assumption. In fact, a best industry practice is to engage with your audience and ensure that you’re active on social media as opposed to being passive. You can achieve this by replying to comments. This shows that there’s a human side to your organisation and it comes in especially handy when it comes to customer complaints. The quicker these are dealt with, the better for your overall business reputation.
8. Optimise links with UTMs
Finally, we reach UTMs or Urchin Tracking Modules. If all this sounds a bit technical or complicated right now, don’t worry. As will likely happen with many of your posts, you will want to lead your audience to your homepage, landing pages or even blog posts. This will necessarily imply posting links together with your content.
By implementing UTMs in your links, you’ll be better able to gauge the ways in which your audience engages with your content and brand. And this will also help you achieve better tracking, enabling you to determine which type of content is more successful than the previous one. Ultimately, the goal is to use this data to make more informed decisions about your content going forward.
In a nutshell
Much like you would optimise your blog posts with the right keywords to rank higher for specific search queries, or your website and digital presence, your social media content needs to be optimised as well. Whether it’s using the right tags or hashtags, it all starts with having a clear strategy in mind. What goals do you want to achieve and how do you plan on doing this incrementally? Once you’ve figured this out, the tips and tricks mentioned above will help you stand in good stead with your patrons and customers, who are increasingly looking for a “human face” behind the corporate veil in its communication with the outside world. Consequently, social media content optimisation should be a key priority in your marketing efforts and one that should not be overlooked.
If you need some assistance with your overall social media and digital presence, let us know and get in touch with us. We’d be happy to help.
