What Is Social Media Optimization?

Whether you’re a blogger or a business, you’re probably looking to make the most of social media to create a following and increase awareness about your brand or your name. 

But growing a social media community around what you do isn’t that easy. Just being on a platform isn’t enough. And that’s what social media optimization can do for you. 

If you’re wondering what SMO is, what it takes to create a social media optimization plan, and what the best social media optimization strategies are, just read on. 

What is social media optimization?

SMO means discovering the right type of content for the type of platform that you use and for your specific business. 

Like search engine optimization, there are some things that you can pay attention to in this case, too, but your audience matters the most and also the way you fit in the social media environment. 

Creating a social media strategy is, of course, paramount, but it’s similar to what you’d have to do when putting together a content strategy for your site, for instance. If you’ve ever watched a video of social media optimization experts, they might have mentioned the term ‘social signals’. 

Well, if your social media presence is optimized properly, it’s very likely that you’re going to show up in search results a lot better, too. 

Social media optimization tips

While social media marketing is a challenge for most businesses, optimizing your social media presence often means getting back to the basics. Here are some tips.

1. Pick the right platform

Where does your buyer persona spend most of their time? If you’re B2B, that might be LinkedIn. If you’re B2C, that might be any other social media network. If you manufacture handmade products, the best platforms for you might be Pinterest and Instagram, but also Facebook. 

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If you choose to use several different platforms, keep in mind that your content needs to be optimized for each and every one. Twitter is typically used for short posts, Facebook for average length ones, and Medium for long-form content. Keep that in mind. 

2. Use visual marketing

Nothing catches someone’s eye better than visual content. No matter the platform you’re on, including a customized image in your post increases the likelihood of you getting comments and having your post shared.

Even B2B channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn have users who react better to visual content. 

3. Encourage sharing

Whether you’re a business owner or you’re a blogger, it really doesn’t hurt to ask your co-workers, employees, or just your friends to share your content. 

The point here is to get it to as many people as possible, and after all, that’s what social signals are — and the number of shares matters a lot.

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4. Use hashtags

Hashtags can make it easier for your brand to be discovered specifically by people who are interested in the same things. Instagram posts that are accompanied by a hashtag receive about 10% more engagement compared to posts that have no hashtags at all.

Of course, hashtags can be used on any platform, but on Facebook or Twitter, using too many looks like you’re trying too much. Plus, an abundance of hashtags can even be correlated with a drop in engagement. 

5. Rely on social media optimization tools

It’s far easier to schedule your posts for a whole week and then merely interact with the people who leave you comments instead of having to come up with new social media content every day. 

Create a plan and then decide on the tools that you are going to use for automation. For example, for scheduling, you could use Buffer or SproutSocial while for automation, you might want to try out Marketo or Salesforce. 

Even SEMrush has a Social Media Toolkit that can be used to manage all of your social media profiles and that you can try with the offer below.

A great tool that we recommend is Canva (and some of its features are actually free), but so is PicMonkey — these two can be used to create customized images for every platform. In case you didn’t know, the same image size doesn’t work for Pinterest, Facebook, and LinkedIn — they all have to be different. 

Social media optimization techniques 

To reach your social media goals, you will have to create a strategy and stick to it over time. But this can only be done if you look at your ideal social media users, and you perform a bit of competitive analysis before anything else. 

If you are a brand, you can simply look at your competitors, what they are sharing, and how they are interacting with their potential customers. If you are a blogger, you can do the same thing for bloggers in the same niche. 

You can then create a similar (yet original) strategy, test it, change it as you begin to see whether it offers results or not, and then adjust it until it becomes perfect for what you have in mind. 

In the end, you should know that social media isn’t something entirely different from search engine optimization and a marketing strategy, in general. Social can help you rank better and can even tell you what type of content works best for the type of audience you have. 

Want to learn more about social media optimization and other parts of digital marketing and SEO? We have many different plans available and we also offer consultancy. Use the button below to reach out.

Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years. In this time I have gained extensive knowledge in the subject of SEO and have build up a wealth of experience in SEO and other digital marketing services.

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