Social Media Optimization| Importance and How to Optimize Your Social Media

Search engine optimization is a popular tool used in online business than Social media optimization. Social media has recently become another growing platform through which you can reach your target audience online and get more traffic to your website. This article will explain what social media Optimization means, importance and how to optimize your social media.

What is Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization means using social media as an instrument to grow your company’s online presence. Where some companies tend to just set up a profile on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter to be where their customers are, SMO is about strategically creating, building and maximizing your social media plan to connect with your target audience.

Social media is an excellent opportunity for your company to grow online. When using social media optimization, you create, build, and maximize your social media plan. Social media allows you to connect better with your audience on various social media platforms.

Social media optimization helps your brand stand out in the crowd. It gets you followers, subscribers, and brings conversions. It increases your brand awareness, user engagement, make your content viral and increase the influence of your brand. Social media is used for scraping news, get valuable information, interact, and use it as a community. You can target the audience from various places to increase your brand awareness.

Social media allows you to do the following: 

• Strengthen your brand
• Get more visibility online
• Connect with your audience
• Generate leads

Importance Of Social Media Optimization

1. Ensures a Strong Presence on the Web: With SMO, you can ensure a strong web presence for the business and establishes the internet authority of the brand. SMO does not only introduce readers to your website or business but also helps you in branding, improving brand visibility and recall of your content or article. 

2. Increases the Reach: Social media optimization creates the avenue for you to reach out to a target audience or readers. The SMO allows you to present your brand to the customers on their terms. Being accessible makes it easy for your readers to reach out to you from everywhere they are. 
   
3. Drive More Traffic: Social Media Optimization is an avenue for traffic generation. The social media channels allow you to reach customers worldwide. Moreover, this can happen without extra investments.
4.  Lead Generation: Lead generation means to have good contents that your readers or visitors to your site will like to share on social media platforms. Your content should be able to generate inbound links to your site that will also improve your ranking. Although social media is particularly useful for branding and creating a buzz, it is increasingly used for lead generation. Utilizing social media channels can transform the lead generation campaigns significantly.
5.  Improves Search Engine Ranking: In line with the search engine optimization, social media optimization can also help in improving the ranking on the search engines. Because search engines have started acquiring data from social media channels such as Google+ and showing them on the search results, Social Media Optimization has gained prominence among marketers.

How to do Social Media Optimization

1. Optimize your strategy: To optimize your social media, you need to have a strategy to achieve this. Social media keeps updating and upgrading regularly, for you to be relevant in your online business, you must equally upgrade and update your strategies. Ensure you have your set goals and objectives right. Your objectives might range from making your brand known to your readers and increasing your traffic. Lack of strategy is one of the barriers hindering you from optimizing your social media. Your social media optimization strategy should include building your presence on social media and achieving your desired results.
2. Analyse your Audience: Choose the social media platform you know your audience often visit and use it to post your articles. You need to know the current social media platform that is in vogue and the platform that the audience prefers to use. The audience will prefer a social media platform that gives them the best connections they need. Using the social media platform your audience use will help you generate traffic and also rank high.
3. Perform competitive analysis: You need to analyze your competitors. Know how they often engage in social media, the type of social media content work for your competitors and the those that rank high in the industry. You can also use content exploration tool to check a high ranking article of your competitor or even their the traffic they generate. To use this tool, you only type in the domain name of your competitor to see the traffic they generate and their ranking.
4. Keyword Research Verification: Keyword research means identifying the words, phrases and topics your target audience or readers search for. Knowing the keyword your readers search for will help you to know the type of content you publish for them. The same way search engine optimization use keyword for analysis is the same way social media optimization use keyword. It is important you know the topics, hashtags, keywords your audience use to search for information on social media. When you use these keywords in writing your content, you have a better chance of being found when your audience search for it on the search engine.
5. Optimize Your Profile: Social media Optimization is similar to search engine optimization. In the search engine, you optimize your website but in social media, you optimize your profile. The foundation of social media starts with the company's profile page. To optimize your social media profile, here are tips on how to achieve it: 

• Profile Photo: Since you are trying to build your new brand, you must add your company logo to your profile picture or use your passport picture if you are a freelancer or consultant.
• User Name: Though it is recently difficult to choose a social media user name for companies. But when you chose one, make sure it becomes your brand name, use it as your handle in all your social media platforms so that it will be easier for your audience to recognise you on any of the platforms. To check if your company name is still available for use on all social media platforms, you can use the tool called knowem
• Bio: This is where you state what your company is specialised on and the services they can offer. You can also put a link to your website while filling in your bio. Adding your link and relevant keywords in your bio will make your site visible and generate more traffic to your site. 
• Cover Photo: Uploading your cover photo on your social media page is an opportunity for you to showcase what your business is all about. Your cover photo should reflect or present a pictorial picture of your business. 
• Fill out all Information: All social media platforms give you room to fill in all your required information. You should take your time to create your profile by completing the form.
  
• 6. Optimize Your Content: To succeed in social media, you have to optimize your content. You need to share quality, engaging and relevant contents on your platform for you to be able to retain the interest of your audience. Two types of content can be published on social media.
• Original Content: These are contents that are specifically published for the social media audience.
• Curative Content: These are contents that are shared from any other source around theweb.
  

Tips To Posting On Social Media

Make sure you post quality and relevant contents on your social media. These are tips that can help you when posting your content on social media.

• Test Your Headlines: Ensure you use different headlines for different posts. Using a variety of headlines makes your feed fresh. For example, when you want to post on Facebook and tweeter, use different headlines.
• Use Images: The use of images is very important in optimizing your social media content. Ensure the image you share is of a high-quality. Including your featured image on all your post on social media will also make it possible for your audience to recognise you.
• #Hashtags: Hashtags has become a way of recognising a trending topic on social media. Hashtags help your post to get more audience, increase traffic, and make it possible for people that are not even searching for or following you to find your content.
• Post Length: It is important to know the no of characters needed for each post. Knowing the ideal status required can enable you to increase your traffic or no of visitors that will visit your site.
• 7. Optimize Your Post Schedule: The time you post your content on social media is as important as the post itself. You need to publish your post when your audience is online to see it. Below are tips optimize your social media posting schedule. 
• Best Time To Post On Social Media: To determine the best time to post your content on social media depends on the site you are using, type of content you post and your target audience. To know the best time to post on social media, click here

                How Often To Post On Social Media: It is also important to know how often you post on social media. Chose how often you post and maintain it. Ensure that you are always publishing posts regularly. Here’s a breakdown of the optimal social media posting frequency for different social networks according to research from Constant Contact:

    Facebook: 3-10 times per week

    Twitter: 5+ times per day

    LinkedIn: 2-5 times per week

    Pinterest: 5-10 times per day

Have a schedule of how you want to be publishing your posts on social media and be disciplined about it.

                                        Conclusion

Social Media Optimization can improve the way you approach social media sites. Take a strategic approach to social media usage and to maximize your results.