Author: Prema Chandrasekaran

A GUIDE TO Social Media OPTIMIZATION

New to Social Media? Not having a head or tail of Social Media Optimization?

Fret not! We have been there too and that is why we are going to help you out with Social Media Optimization and how it helps with your Branding and improve the overall performance of your company

Social Media is what people use today to communicate with each other online. There weren’t many social media sites a few years back but now there are so many platforms.

Who would have imagined Social media sites being used for business!? But now, Social Media plays an important role in the marketing of the companies.

Rohit Bhargava, founder of Non-obvious company was the one to come up with the term Social Media Optimization for the first time. He also mentioned the Five important rules of Social Media Optimization.

If you think you can get away without doing Social Media Optimization and not use Social Media platforms, then you are wrong. The rave of Social Media is not ending any soon. And with each day, Social Media keeps evolving. Even old people are starting to use Facebook these days. Everyone from young to old people are in one or two of the social media channels at the least. You have to leverage Social Media in your business and reach the today’s audience.

So if you haven’t already started to implement SMO in your marketing strategy, it’s high time you do. There are some tips for Social Media Optimization which you can consider for better results.

Difference between SMO and SMM

Social Media Optimization

The process of working on our website to make it best perform on the social media.  Some things that are included in SMO are

• Optimizing our on page
• Creating Social media profiles
• Creating shareable content like  blogs, videos, images, infographics etc.
• Adding social media widgets
• Integrating social media button into our web pages
• Posting regularly

These will help improve the online visibility that will increase the inbound traffic to the website.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is the next level to Social Media Optimization. SMM starts once smo ends. In SMM, you will promote the content you created in different social media channels. Competitor analysis, creating social media strategies, social media campaigns, interacting with the customers, analysing the things we do on social media. SMM includes paid advertisement as well.

Let us now look at some of the things that shall be achieved by leveraging Social Media and how.

• Branding
• Inbound Traffic
• Loyal brand followers
• Thought Leadership

1. Branding

More often than not, people don’t value the idea of using Social media channels for branding. But they are mistaken. Social media will work wonders for Branding if they are employed properly. And it takes no Harvard brain to apply Social Media for the increase of brand awareness. This blog gives out some of the things we need to know while doing social media branding. Below are certain things you can do to increase the brand awareness.

• Targeting the right crowd

As much as it is important to be on all social platforms, it can’t be emphasized enough on how important to identify your kind of audience and find out in which channel your audience is mostly present.

You can look at the different social media pages of bigger companies and get an idea of how to go about it but do not blindly follow them because what worked for them need not necessarily work for you.

If you are a Business to Consumer company, you might want to use more of Facebook and Instagram than LinkedIn. Putting the same efforts on all platforms may not fetch you the results you wanted and you will only end up wasting your time and energy. Instead, if you identify your audience and what medium they are in, you can focus more in that particular platform and achieve better results than putting the same amount of efforts in all platforms.

• Visual Representation

The next step to branding is to have the attention of the users. And what best way to achieve that than providing them with creative visuals. Designs, infographics, slideshares, videos are the ways to make people turn their heads quickly. If you keep providing the users with quality visuals and grab their attention, they will start to look for you and the content will be shared and people will eventually start discussing about your brand. This way your audience will widen and you’ll become familiar. And that’s how you will start to be recognized as a brand.

• Interactive Content

Your company is looked as a separate person itself that has its own personality. If your content is only about your company or brand, it’ll come out as self obsessing that is only concerned about the company or brand. It should rather talk about people. People should believe you care and that is possible only if you really do genuinely care for them. Just talking and having their attention alone won’t do. You should let people talk and listen. Your content should be a two way street. You communicate, they communicate. It should be interactive rather than just you talking.

• Originality

If you want your audience to engage with your brand and not just know the brand, you should have original content. Give people something that they value of, something they can talk about. Give them something original and unique and get them asking for more.

• Metrics

Okay, so you are doing all this but how do you know if it’s working or not. How do you measure the work you are doing? Use the Metrics. There is always Google Analytics which you can use to get the data of your social media activity of all channels. And in every Social Media channel, they have provided the Insights option for you to measure everything that is done. According to this blog of Neil Patel, there are 5 essential metrics we should measure.

With the use of the tools you can always have a tab on what’s working and what is not. And this way you can concentrate on things that is well working for you and lessen the things that are not.

2. Let your incoming traffic flow!

Your Social Media channels pave a way to increase the right kind of audience to your website. The traffic that is received when people visit our website by themselves is called inbound traffic. Those people visit on their own because they are interested in what we do and are mostly likely to get converted.

So if you don’t widen your horizons and use social media for your business, you will never extends your range of audience. Having various social media channels increase your inbound links as well.

If we are not in Social media, there isn’t many ways to promote the content you create. With the help of Social media platforms, we get to share our content which will reach a huge set of people.

We should be found on all Social Media channels, because the same set of people is not going to be on all channels. The young generation is most likely to get to our website using Facebook or Instagram while the working professionals might find us on LinkedIn.

This way you share your quality content on various platforms and increase your inbound traffic by leading them to your website.

3. Building Loyal Brand followers

Quality always comes before quantity. While it is important to have huge number of followers for our brand, it is of no use if those are just numbers and the people are just following you like they would follow any other brand. Only followers who are loyal to your brand adds value and only they mention our brand and get the word out.

Few things you can do to increase loyal brand followers are

• Create proper plan for all Social Media channels

Each platform of social media is different from the others. Define your goal, be clear on what you want to achieve and create a plan for all the platforms. Once you are clear on how your audience want to perceive you, you will know what kind of content you want to give them. If you provide your followers with quality rich content, there are higher chances of sharing and you will have more people loyal to your brand.

• Valuable Content

Try blogs, images, videos, audio and see what works best for you but make sure it is worth the time for the people. Visuals always have better engagement factor and it gets shared easily as well. But don’t keep stuffing them with content that don’t add a value to the users. Every content you put out should be as valuable and useful as it can get.

• Consistency is the Key

Your content gives away who you are. So it is important that you are persistent in every content you provide.The content created should be in a way that would make people identify it is your content easily without thinking too hard. To reach that level, you have to always stick with your brand values and never digress from what you are here for.

• Clear the doubts

It doesn’t matter if you are a bigger or a smaller brand. If there is a concern, you have to reach out to the people and make sure it is resolved. And people will have doubts regardless of the size of the company you have and the questions they ask should be answered. Instead of limiting your response only to your followers, there are many forums and question and answer websites wherein you could search for questions related to your industry and leave an answer. This way you will gain popularity and people will know you are good in what you do.

4. Thought Leadership

The final but the most difficult to achieve is the thought leadership. The leader of the industry you have chosen should be you. For example, if you are a designing company, whenever there is a talk about design, your brand should be remembered. By following all the above above things, you will get to this Thought Leadership.

Provide quality content, reach out to people, show you care and be omnipresent. Once you have achieved thought leadership, your brand is there to stay and people will start looking out for you.

Choosing the right Social Media Channel for your business

Although having a social media presence in all social media platform is very important, it is not possible to spend quality time on every social media channel and honestly is not required too. Depending upon your demographics, the type of business, the goal of your business and what you want to achieve through social media, you can choose which platform you need to focus on.

• Recognizing your consumers

The first step to find out which platforms will be best for our business is to identify who our customers are. We have to be really specific in finding the right audience. The age, gender, location, educational qualification, annual income, interests etc. are the main factors to be taken into consideration to narrow down our type of audience.

• Set your goals right

After you have recognized your customers, you have to get your goal fixed. The goal could be anything. You might want to derive  sales from them or just provide customer support, or use social media for brand awareness. Once you have figured out what you want to do using social media, you can create a profile accordingly.

• Locate your audience

Now you know what kind of audience you need to focus and also identified your goals. The next thing is  to find out which platform you audience is present and how or to say what purpose they use each social media for. If you locate your audience correctly, it will help you focus more on those social media channels.

We will have a look at some of the popular social media sites and see which platform will be best for what kind of users

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Google Plus

1. Facebook

The most used social network among all the other social media channels is Facebook. Facebook has a huge crowd than when compared to other networks. This will work best if you have existing customers because in that huge number of people, these are people who already know you and it will be easy for you to build a brand loyalty.

Facebook may not be the right platform for you if you are just starting out and trying to get new business since Facebook is being used by so many people. But we can focus on targeting the existing audience and have followers that are loyal to our brand.

Facebook is mainly used by people for keeping in touch with the people they know and build new relationships. So if you have some existing clients and trying to keep in touch with them, Facebook is the right option. And this will work best for customer support as well.

2. Instagram

Instagram is growing to be the next big thing. It is where the young millennials are found. So if your target audience includes young people, Instagram is perfect for you. This channel can be best used for visuals. With really good pictures, you can tap the instagram audience easily.

The most important thing though in Instagram is the hashtag. Find the most used hashtag in your niche and use it on relevant post. The more hashtag you use, the more you’re likely to be easily found. You can also be a trendsetter and create a hashtag of your own and trend it. Although it might take some amount of time to become a trend but once done, you would have a hashtag of your own.

3. YouTube

YouTube has become the biggest search engine platform. Content is what is most important in YouTube. You must produce videos that are informative.

The best content that works on YouTube are tutorials, educational. This will work best for your business if are able to provide value to the users watching your video.  They must think it is worth the time spent after they finish watching it.

4. Twitter

Twitter is where you can find the trending topics. It is quite to easy to build your brand in twitter. Hashtag is really important in Twitter as well. People see what’s trending using the hashtag on twitter. This way, you will be easily found if you use popular hashtags relevant to your industry. So, if you are a company that is starting out new, you can utilise Twitter in a proper way.

5. Pinterest

You can consider Pinterest as a bulletin board for the web. Pinterest is majorly  dominated by female audience. DIY crafts, high resolution images, infographics, cooking recipes etc work really well in Pinterest.So, if you provide quality visual content and have female audience as your main target, Pinterest will work best for you.

6. Google Plus

Many people dismiss Google Plus because it does not have a good reach compared to other social networking sites. Although it will work if you are into software, engineering, architecture or design industry. It is very much important to be active on Google Plus because it is a product of Google and it really helps with the SEO ranking of our website.

Social Media Optimization Strategies

• Create a thorough social media profile with proper details of the company
• Optimize your social media pages
• Add Social Media Badges into your website
• Create share worthy content and curate quality content
• Be more active on channels that has your audience and post at regular intervals
• Use as many hashtags as you can that are relevant to your post
• Comment on other social media posts
• Interact with your users. Respond to the comments you get
• Create social media campaigns
• Get the help of the influencers in your niche.

Conclusion

These are some of the few effective ways to build our social media efficiently. In this blog we covered the major parts of social media optimization. This must give you an overall idea of how important implementing social media optimization in our business.