5 Great Tips for Your Social Media SEO Optimisation in 2020
Social media plays a significant role when helping brands to be noticed and grow their digital presence. However, using social media for brand recognition takes patience and hard work, and even more so with the countless numbers of content pieces out there.
For that reason, this article will highlight Social Media Optimization (SMO) as a solution. We'll start by explaining what SMO is, and continue with five tips you can do for best SMO practices.
What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Social Media Optimization, or SMO, is a digital marketing strategy of optimizing your social networks to increase awareness and grow your online presence. The focus of SMO is creating shareable, useful quality content to increase web ranking on the search engine result pages, and relevance on social media platform feeds.
The main importance of SMO content is the sharing part. The more share your content gets, the better SEO and exposure your brand gets. This is because the search engine's intricate algorithms only highlight pages with high audience engagement and relevance.
You can use most social media for SMO, like Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, or Instagram. However, you can also take blogs or forums into consideration.
To further improve your SMO efforts, here are five tips you can use:
Tip #1 Start by Avoiding These Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes
Social media marketing can get tricky as you're getting your content through unpredictable algorithms. You also compete for the spotlight with non-competitor accounts. As a result, the efforts aren't always effective and can lead to mistakes.
Some common mistakes of social media marketing are:
- Using every social media platform. You might be tempted to be everywhere to grow your audience faster, but this contradicts the aim of quality over quantity that SMO focuses on. Focus on the platforms with the most relevance to your target audience, so your content fits the niche you’re filling.
- Posting irrelevant content. Irrelevant or bland content gets ignored by people. So always ensure that your content provides value and resonates with your audience.
- Not engaging with the audience. Ignoring comments or messages from your audience reduces their interests and trust. People enjoy interacting on social media, so use it to build your relationship with them.
- Poor social media scheduling. With different algorithms and user behavior data across social media platforms, poor scheduling can result in irrelevant posting hours or missing social media peak hours. Therefore, always plan your posting time and adjust your content to avoid poor scheduling.
- Using the same content for different platforms. Each social media has different purposes, and so must your content. This increases reach and engagement as your content is more genuine.
Avoiding those mistakes is a good start to create better planning and strategies for SMO.
Tip #2 Grow Your Engaged Social Media Audience
Not all followers on social media actively engage with your content, so thousands of followers don't measure your social media success. Though it takes more time, finding the real ones who regularly interact with you and your posts is the right way for SMO.
To do so, always remember to bring value to your posts. Adding helpful tips, tutorials, and educational posts can increase your audience's interests. Create the content with consistency to maintain the interests of the engaged audience and grow them.
Let's take a look at Nike's global campaign as an example. Titled "Play for the World," the campaign is aimed to promote social distancing in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. With 121 million followers on Instagram and 8.2 million on Twitter, Nike is staying relevant and continues to engage with the audience through this campaign.
Tip #3 Try Viral Content Strategies
Creating and sharing viral content can also help with SMO. It's when your content is spread across social platforms by millions of people. There are different types of viral content, but each of them always increases your brand's credibility.
Below are the strategies you can take to create viral content:
- Fully understand your target audience. The first important thing is to master your target audience. Doing so ensures that your content relates to them. To do this, research the market, learn from competitors, and understand your target audience's online behavior.
- Choose your social media platform. Each social media platform is created differently, and it's smart to choose those that suit your brand best. For a better overview, check out these types of social media.
- Create content with high engagement potential. Take advantage of the latest trends. Whatever type of your viral content – educational, inspirational, or entertaining – your content must evoke emotion. This increases the engagement, even from the audience demographic not related to your business.
- Advertise or use-third party services. As creating viral content is often easier said than done, you can use online ads or third-party services to take the reach further.
Many brands have succeeded in making viral content. One example we're highlighting is National Geographic's #PlanetorPlastic campaign. When the magazine cover was launched in 2018, it raised awareness on the plastic trash crisis. Aside from its global relevance, the cover also provoked emotions, making it a successful viral content.
Tip #4 Use SEO-Relevant Keywords In Your Social Media Posts
To increase engagement with your social media posts and make them effective for SEO, you need to use relevant keywords. Choose the right words and hashtags when promoting your posts, so it reaches the right audience and stands out from countless others.
You can do this by listing the relevant keywords to your business. This allows you to place them strategically in your posts, and where social media planning comes useful. SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner are among the online tools you can use to find your keywords.
Once you have your keywords, carefully use them in your posts. Adding hashtags is always the most feasible way to do it, but you can also include them in the caption. However, avoid using your keywords too much as it can be counted as spam content.
Tip #5 Measure and Improve Conversion Rates
As one of the most crucial marketing aspects – the conversion rate – calculates how many visit your website and fulfill a desired action, like making a transaction or converting to a follower. Measuring it allows you to improve your conversion as you'll know which action to focus on, fix, or remove.
To measure it, understand and determine what conversion you want for your business. Getting a conversion is getting your audience to accomplish an action through a call-to-action. So define your conversion through analyzing your business goals with the target market to help with the measurement.
It also helps when you track and understand important conversion metrics, such as the number of followers, engagement, traffic sources, and revenue. You can use Google Analytics to help track your conversion rates.
When you understand how to measure and track your conversions, it's easier to improve them as you know which actions work best for your business.
Wrapping Up
Social media marketing can go a long way when promoting your brand. I hope these tips help you both establish yourself on your chosen platforms, and to see your posts floating on Google’s search engine result pages.
About the Author:
Mary is a founder and chief editor at her digital content and SEO agency PRable.org. She is passionate about digital marketing innovations. The technologies and online businesses are her engines she loves to write about.