Internet marketers have been promoting their content using optimization techniques including social media optimization (SMO) and search engine optimization (SEO).

You might be one of those who are trying have a full understanding between the two optimizations. On this article we’ll cover both techniques but with more more focus on SMO, and how you can use it.

The most well known optimization is search engine optimization, which is a combination of techniques to receive traffic on a website via search engine results page (SERP) on search engines. But since the growth of social media in the mid 2000’s, SMO emerged as another important optimization.

What is Social Media Optimization?

Since SEO helps your receive traffic through search engines. Social Media Optimization is combination of techniques to receive traffic through various social networks and social bookmarking sites.

Optimizing your social media helps you get backlinks to your website, is part of off-page seo. That on its own helps your site rank high on search engines and drive traffic to your site.

Build a social media strategy

For any business now to do well on social media they need a social media strategy, which will include a detailed plan. Working on a strategy will reduce the costs and ensures success from the on set.

Social media strategy is part of a online marketing strategy or digital strategy that works as inbound marketing. It helps you pull the required users or traffic to your business. In today’s world not having such a strategy might be costly to a business.

A social media strategy will just enhance your social media optimization, and make most of your posts attractive.

Your strategy should help you create effective content for your profiles. It should also define the time period you want to achieve your results. A strategy should be consistent with your brand and amplify your brand, and ensures that you don’t get off track.

How to create content for social media optimization

When creating your content for social media you should include text, images, videos and other types of files. Text only can not bring the required results, but a combination of images and text or videos will do.

Images and videos tend to have a high click through rate on social media and search engines. People are attracted to visuals online more than just words.

Complete your profiles

One thing most social media assistants or managers tend to do is leave their profiles incomplete. A complete profile should include a full bio and everything such as the website url.

It does not end there the company logo should be named accordingly and uploaded in very profile. You should also not forget resized to the exact number size required by the social network.

Why is it important to do keyword research?

Just like seo, is very important to do keyword research before posting on social media. SEO and social media optimization go hand in hand, which is why you should do keyword research. You need to check which keyword phrases your target audience are using social media. This should help you create relevant content that includes those keywords.

The most common forms of keywords include a #hashtag, and it can be used in most social networks. Even though #hashtags are very popular on Twitter and Instagram, they can also be used on Facebook and other social networks.

Most of the keywords that you use on your website content can also be used on your social media content. But it would be wise to check the most common keywords on social media so that you keep all your readers.

Common social networks you should have presence on

There’s quite too many social networks you can select from on the internet and build your presence. But there are major ones that you should not miss, based on their performances and number of users.

Facebook tops the list with it’s number of users and the results it brings. There’s over two billion registered users and a huge number of daily active users.

Twitter is a leading microblogging social network site in the world, it also has hundreds of millions of users globally. You can post daily tweets of up to 140 characters including images or videos. It can have a significant impact on delivering the latest news.

Linkedin is a social network designed for professionals. It also gives you an opportunity to create a company page profile. That’s where you can write almost anything about your business.

Instagram is another social network owned by facebook, it uses images and runs on mobile devices. You can share interesting images with your audience.

Google Plus is a good social network that one should not ignore, most of the content posted on google plus tends to rank high on Google.

YouTube can help anyone upload videos and do online video marketing. Also videos uploaded on YouTube tend to rank high Google, if they are optimized properly. They can appear on the search engine results page and be off great benefit.

There are many other social networks that you can add on your list. Just make sure you are able to manage and they add value to to your social media marketing strategy.

Build your profiles

It takes time to build you social media accounts, you might need more than six months to be an authority. A person who has just opened their social media profiles might not have much authority like someone who opened their a year ago.

It takes at least six months to build a profitable social media profile if you are constantly posting and making friends or gaining followers.

You should not consider buying followers because most of them are fake accounts. Rather build your accounts slowly and gaining trust from real people that having a lot of fake followers. This was done mostly on twitter but it can also apply on other social networks and emails. It has been proven that having lots of unreal accounts wont help you on social media optimization or your social media strategy.

How often should you post on social media?

There should be a posting strategy that you follow so that your content reach the right people at the right time. Social networks differ based on their types of users and their daily or weekly activity.

Some social networks are active in the mornings between 5am to 9am. Then they will be highly active again afternoon between 3pm to 10pm.

This is the time where most users are online posting, commenting and reading other posts. That makes it the ideal time for you to post your content.

Apart from that you should post at least 3–10 times per week on Facebook. And on Twitter you should post 2–5 times per day. It can just most in the morning, noon and evening. If you are using YouTube you can upload a video a day. On other social networks like Instagram or Linkedin you can post one or twice a day.

Integrate social media to most or your content

One way to get your posts popular is by having social share buttons on most of your content. Social share buttons can be similar to word of mouth which helps spread the word. You can include them on posts, emails or anything that you can come up with

You should have social share buttons in most of your online content and encourage users to share your content. The more your content is shared the higher the number of people you will reach. You should thank those who share your content since they are assisting you on getting your posts out there.

Social media management and monitoring

Having many social media accounts can be overwhelming at times. Social media optimization is also about managing and monitoring your social media profiles. There are several social media marketing tools one can use to manage multiple social media profiles.

Those types of tools also assist in monitoring the performance of your posts. Some of the best tools you can use is Sprout Social and Hootsuite.

Some of the good tools will also help you schedule your posts for certain time intervals. A social media monitoring tool is vital in keeping track of your profiles and gives you a full analysis of every account.

Instead of going through your accounts one by one you can have them in one place. It you should also be able to respond to comments.

Try to respond to comments asap

When you have already applied social media optimization on your profiles, comments will become an everyday task. Comments in you posts whether it be your posts on social media or your blog, they should be attended. They are the ones that help you engage with your readers or your social media followers.

They bring life to your social media posts. If you’ve been paying attention you will see that post that have many comments tend to appear many times on your timeline.

Conclusion

I hope you like this article about social media optimization and learned something in return. Following what’s been covered on this article might benefit you or your business.

There might be something that I left out on this post, you are welcome to share on the comment section. If you have questions leave a comments I would be happy to respond to it.

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