- Social media optimization is the practice of auditing your business’s social properties to ensure they are in line with social media best practices.
- By optimizing your social profiles you can increase engagement, website traffic, visibility in search engines, and more!
- Just as each social media network attracts a different audience, each social media network should be optimized in different ways.
- Social media is a competitive sport, so making sure you do your best to stand out is essential.
If you’ve ever played sports when you were younger or have rehearsed for a competition then you know the purpose of practice. Coaches run you or your team through drills to sharpen one particular skill or set of skills. Similarly, if you’ve practiced on your own for a competition (like a debate, for example) then you’ve prepared for counter-arguments or worked on supporting exercises that help you improve your skills in other areas.
Optimizing your company’s social media profiles is no different! There are certain skills or techniques you can implement to set yourself up for success during your day-to-day social strategy. In this article, we’ll cover what you need to know about optimizing each of your social media channels for success.
What is social media optimization (SMO)?
Social media optimization, or SMO as you may know it, is the practice of auditing your business’s social properties to ensure they are in line with social media best practices. This includes optimizing your company’s social media profiles or optimizing the structure of your social media posts.
Why is SMO important?
Like SEO, SMO is all about establishing a strong foundation for your digital properties that helps launch your campaign into the stratosphere. With SEO you are optimizing your site but with SMO you are optimizing your social profiles. By optimizing your social profiles you can increase engagement, website traffic, visibility in search engines, and more!
Let’s dive into ways you can optimize your profiles for each of the major social media channels.
Hashtags: Hashtags are HUGE on social media. On Instagram, they’re most important. We’ve talked about this topic before, but hashtag usage is the first place to start in your SMO journey. So, make sure you are targeting hashtags that will attract a lot of engagement and reach.
Linkin.bio: Click the “link in bio”! Bio links are vital for leveraging your Instagram audience for web traffic. Linkin.bio is one of the best tools but there are plenty of others out there. Essentially these tools let you link to web content from the images you decide to share. It lets you tap into an otherwise wasted pool of users looking to read content.
Biography: The bio provides another optimization opportunity for your brand. Here you can add a 150 character description of your business. It’s a great way to quickly introduce people to your brand and online personality! Bonus tip: Your name on your Instagram profile is searchable so be sure to include some highly searched keywords in there! This also becomes your page title in Google Search so there’s a two-sided benefit of optimizing your Instagram name.
Hashtags: Using hashtags on Twitter isn’t quite as popular as it is on Instagram (even though Twitter basically birthed the hashtag). Nonetheless, it’s still a best practice to use just a few for those who monitor hashtags on Twitter. Plus, using hashtags just gives Twitter more context about your profile/tweets so maybe they’ll include it as a featured tweet for users who follow Topics.
Social cards: Social cards are more of a website metadata optimization but if you have your social cards optimized for Twitter your feed will look exponentially better. By having properly sized and formatted social cards you can share links to blog articles or other pages on your site that help drive engagement and traffic to your site. They just make for a cleaner-looking tweet.
Hashtags: The same goes here, hashtags aren’t very popular on Facebook but still a best practice. Plus, using hashtags on Facebook gives you the opportunity to highlight your brand’s personality. So, if you decide to display a comedic brand personality then add in a few funny hashtags to your posts.
About Section: The About Section on Facebook is a great place to introduce your brand’s history to prospective customers. So, roll those sleeves up and get ready to write up a kickass brand story!
Facebook Shop: The Facebook Shop feature is designed specifically for eCommerce brands so if you aren’t an online shop then you can’t make use of this one (sorry)! But, if you are, make sure you set it up. Facebook has integrations with most eCommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce so with just a few clicks you can have your whole shop uploaded to Facebook. By following this step you’ll make it easier for page likers to travel down the funnel.
About Section: Speaking of About sections, Linkedin also has an About section that’s great for highlighting your brand too. But, beware Linkedin can be a much different audience than what you’ll find on Facebook. So, on Linkedin you’ll likely want to highlight your brand’s story but more importantly your values and culture. This will be important for motivating prospective employees about your brand and what it stands for.
Linkedin Groups: From an engagement boost standpoint, Linkedin Groups is where its at. Engaging with like minded individuals online is valuable on all platforms. It allows you to display some thought leadership in your niche and shows others in that niche that you are an active member of the community. This will likely lead to more engagement and a boost in followers in the long run.
Notifying employees: Your employees are likely your most active followers. They work for you and if you’ve built a positive and motivational culture they’ll likely be the first to engage with your posts. So, leverage the ‘Notify employees’ feature on Linkedin to let your employees know about your most recent Linkedin update!
Let us know how we can help
These are just a few ways you can optimize your company’s social media profiles. This article could easily exceed 2,000 words if we listed every single way to optimize your brand’s social properties. Social media is a competitive sport so make sure you’re practicing and sharpening your skills for ultimate social media success! And, don’t forget to drop our social media experts a line if you run into trouble. We’d happily be your brand’s social media coach!
