Welcome to our SEO Resolutions series. In this series of blog posts, we’re saying goodbye to 2016 and welcoming 2017 with some SEO resolutions for the new year.

Today, we want to focus on something which doesn’t technically count as SEO, but makes up a huge part of digital marketing and what we at Tamar specialise in;  social Media. The importance of Social Media for businesses is no secret, but mistakes are still being made when it comes to frequency of posting, making the most of different platforms, listening to audience engagement, and collecting – as well as understanding – the huge amount of data that social platforms generate. We aim to give you all the tips you need in order to ‘be more social’ in 2017!

How much should I be positing?

The answer to this question depends largely on where you are posting from. For Facebook, a ‘two posts a day’ rule has been long-established, however, Forbes would argue that this rule shouldn’t necessarily always be stuck to. Rather, it only applies if you have an audience size of at least 10,000 followers. If this is the case, then two posts a day is the most fruitful  way to get the best amount of clicks, and the most amount of engagement. Conversely, if you’re Facebook following is smaller, then statistics suggest posting just two times a day may well result in fewer clicks per post, but there will be more engagement than if you were to post more than two times a day.

Perhaps the biggest query businesses have is how much to post on Twitter; you don’t want audiences to forget your brand entirely, but you also don’t want to drown followers in content that they may have no interest for. The bottom line is that if you want to up your engagement per post, it might be best to not tweet more than five times per day, but if you are more interested in total responses, then there really isn’t a maximum to the amount you should be tweeting, other than as much as you can manage!

On Instagram, around two posts per day will maximise engagement, although there is nothing to suggest posting more will have a negative effect, due to the large and varied audience that you can reach on the site (through the use of hashtags).

However, over at LinkedIn, a good level to be at is one post per weekday, and not really much more than this. Bare in mind that the content you’ll be positing on LinkedIn may well be more in-depth and thought-provoking than on other platforms, and therefore you shouldn’t feel the need to post more than this.

This moves us nicely on to the next question…

Should I be posting different types of content on different social platforms?

The simple answer to this is yes. But that doesn’t really help anyone. Of course, the type of content you’ll be producing and promoting will vary largely depending on your business/brand. Imagine an e-commerce website that sells women’s luxury shoes.

Twitter can be used as a basis to promote all the content that this business produce, whether this is a blog post, a long-form article, or photo adverts. As well as this, they would use Twitter for all sorts of promotions, as well as engaging with audiences – which we talk about in more detail in our last post on social media.

Facebook is interesting, because more and more businesses have been making the most of the current Facebook trend of a constant circulation of memes by reposting these themselves. This may well mean that our women’s shoes site starts reposting something that may not necessarily have anything to do with the business, but it will have a high chance of generating engagement and getting leads back to the Facebook page. If this can lead to website traffic and purchases, then this is an interesting and new version of the purchase funnel.

For Instagram, it’s a bit more obvious –  the women’s luxury shoes business would be positing mainly images, and some short videos, mainly of example stock, promotions and even model shots. The Size? Instagram is a great example of how e-commerce businesses can make the most out of Instagram.

What our women’s luxury shoes business would post on LinkedIn seems less obvious, but it is a good place to post more thoughtful, long-form content. Perhaps an article about changing trends of the fashion industry. It is crucial to think about audiences, and on LinkedIn this will be probably be like-minded professionals, who will be interested in articles that are related to the business industry as a whole.

How do I make the most of social media data?

It is all very well generating business from use of social media, but if you want to continue to develop and implement new social media strategies, you need to have access to the data. Structured data is easily accessible, often through third party platforms, and social media management software. These sort of tools can generate information such as the amount of clickthroughs from social your website get, or what content drives the highest response. You can even use Google Analytics to generate social stats. As a business you should make use of all the structured data that is available to you, as it can add some real insight.

However, this doesn’t paint the whole picture because more than 90% of social data is unstructured. Unstructured data collection is a relatively new concept, which is being led by IBM’s Watson. There are a number of useful YouTube videos, for those that want to learn more and potentially start using the software. The basic premise of Watson is that it is what IBM describes as ‘Cognitive Computing’, using Machine Learning to “think like a human”, rather than a computer.

Watson Analytics is definitely software that businesses should be looking at and thinking about, mainly because it makes sense of what people are saying online by understanding our language. Looking forward, machine learning and advanced computing could have a massive impact on social media strategies, as it offer new insights that weren’t previously accessible.

Making the most of social media isn’t a secret, but sometimes it can be a bit of a minefield. If you have any more questions about how to optimise your social media campaign, then feel free to reach out to the Tamar team, we’d be delighted to hear from you in 2017.