10 Tips for Your Efficient Social Media Optimization

1. What is Social Media Optimization?
2. What is the aim of social media optimization?
3. For whom is social media optimization particularly relevant and what is influenced?
4. 10 Tips for Your Social Media Optimization
5. How can the success of social media optimization be checked?
6. Which tools support you in Social Media Optimization?
7. Conclusion on social media optimization

More and more people worldwide are communicating via social networks, blogs, and similar channels. For businesses, this opens up new ways of reaching out to their (potential) customers and taking customer loyalty to a new level. Therefore, Social Media is an optimal addition for your company's marketing, as you can show your personal side and involve your audience in daily business.

Here's where social media optimization comes into play. From the world of online commerce, it has become indispensable and essential for business success online. But what is it anyway? In this article, we explain the purpose and meaning of social media optimization, who needs it, and provide some valuable tips on how you can design your social channels to get the most out of your Social media strategy.

What is Social Media Optimization?

Social Media Optimization, or SMO, includes all the measures a company undertakes to best present its content and products on social platforms. In general terms, SMO refers to everything you can do to improve your social media presence. But it's not just about the usual suspects like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Co. Forums, review pages and comment functions are also part of the social media world.

There are hardly any companies that do not communicate with their users via social networks. If social media is also an important communication channel and traffic delivery for you, it is absolutely essential to align your optimization strategies directly with it in order to increase your brand awareness accordingly, encouraging Interactions of users with your content and thus expanding your content's reach.

The measures can vary from optimizing your own website (SEO) or your own Instagram channel to public presentations in forums and on review websites. With this optimization, you simplify for your users the process of sharing your content, registering, and starting direct communication with you.

What is the aim of social media optimization?

SMO is about understanding which content works best for your company and, in return, contributes to the goal of your social media strategy. As social media is so versatile and each platform has different functions, it can also be used to pursue a variety of different goals: both reach and follower numbers can be increased, interaction with your own and potential target groups is enabled, and your own reputation can be positively influenced online.

With social media optimization, it's not just about presenting your company or your products on different channels, but also optimizing your website and the content shown there so that users can find them more easily via social channels and ideally spread them further. In this way, SMO not only generates leads and backlinks, but also promotes sales.

For whom is social media optimization particularly relevant and what is influenced?

Social media is not only an important part of private and professional life, it is also an important source of leads and traffic, and, just like search engines, paid ads, and affiliate partners, one of the necessary tools to achieve your corporate goals. So, if you want to benefit from the various potentials of social media, choose an optimal set-up for your company.

So, what impact does social media optimization have? In general, it can improve your connection, your direct contact with your audience on various social media platforms, which in turn strengthens your brand, as you gain visibility, generate more leads, and generally strengthen trust with your followers. Where and how effective SMO is, depends on your individual social media analysis.

10 Tips for Your Social Media Optimization

1. The decision is crucial

As with all activities related to social media, the choice of platform(s) for your business is essential for social media optimization. The choice is of course dependent on the audience you want to address and the goal you want to achieve. In short, you need to choose the social channels where your target audience is most active. It is also important to join the platforms that attract the users who are interested in your brand.

To reach your target audience where they spend most of their time, you should not just rely on your gut feeling, but engage intensively with the data. Use the campaign management tools of the major social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and analyze exactly where you can address your desired audience successfully.

Most important point: check your data regularly to be able to react quickly and accurately.Question your content and analyze your target audience's behaviour constantly. Here, using dashboards can be of great advantage. So you don't have to analyze each channel individually, but have all your campaign activities at a glance.

2. Develop (or evolve) your strategy

To optimize something, it must first have been clearly defined at some point. In this case, we're talking about the goals that you've set for your business and the goals your Social Media Strategy should achieve. You should ask yourselves the following questions:

• Who are you? Make it clear what you stand for as a brand, what values you represent, and what message you want to give to your audience.
• What do you want to achieve? Do you want to make as many sales as possible? Are you looking for new talent? Do you want to increase your general awareness? The more precisely you define what you want to get out of it, the more accurately you can direct your social media strategy towards it. What's important here are realistic and above all measurable goals.
• Who do you want to reach? Without a defined target group, no content with added value. Only if you know your potential customers can you also create good content for them. Clearly, defining a target group in social media is not an easy topic and requires time and sensitivity. Once you've figured out what appeals to your target audience, what interests and needs they have and what added value they expect from you, the more accurately you can align your content with them.

3. Social media marketing is a team effort

One of the most effective ways to optimize social media is to involve the entire team in the marketing plan. Simply put, this means employees following your company accounts, liking, sharing or commenting on your content, and even participating in the creation of content pieces. All these activities increase your visibility and interaction with your channels.

4. Keywords, keywords, keywords

To build an effective marketing strategy, you can't get around doing a Keyword Research. A lot of time must be budgeted to find all the Keywords frequently used in your industry and niche. Continuity is particularly important here: Regularly including keywords in your content helps more users notice you and find your page.

5. You Are the Figurehead

Maintaining and updating your own profile is often neglected more than you'd think. However, Creating a social media profile is a fairly simple and uncomplicated process. But it doesn't stop with creation, regular adjustments should always be kept in mind. Your profile picture should be current, your username and biography must accurately reflect what your company and your brand identity want to say. Keep all the information that you give to other users up-to-date. This ensures that your company is easier to find and more users can interact with you.

6. Content is key

This point is fairly self-explanatory, but it shouldn't be left out in our list. One of the most important points for social media optimization is the content you share with the world. The quality of the posts must be right - both in terms of text and visuals - they must be original, and of course relevant to your audience. To get better at this, you can experiment with different approaches, such as inserting relevant links and title tags.

You should always keep in mind: When scrolling through social media, people typically have limited time to understand the message of the content. So, your message must be easy to digest, i.e., easy to comprehend and yet catchy enough to stay in the mind. A strong visual language, meaningful teasers, and the direct address of your target group are particularly important here. It helps to imagine that you're talking with your friends and telling them about something cool.

7. Images stick in the mind

On social platforms, you primarily gain your audience's attention through visual content. Pictures and videos catch users more than long texts, so you should definitely integrate visual elements into your social media strategy. A great tool for quickly and easily creating graphics or content for your social media channels is Canva Pro.

8. Use hashtags correctly

Did you know that hashtags originally became known through Twitter? Their use is now common practice on all social media platforms. They help to make your content more easily found by encouraging interaction with popular topics and current trends. Hence, hashtags are also an ideal way to optimize your social media appearance, as this can increase the visibility of your content.

In general, generic social media hashtags increase the visibility of your posts. Hashtags specifically geared towards your industry and niche promote more intense user interaction. So keep a balanced hashtag mix!

9. Establish a timetable

Like all measures in social media marketing, the optimization of social media requires a well-organized and effective planning. By creating an editorial framework, you prevent yourself from getting mixed up with your planned posts, you can define both thematic and visually balanced post intervals, and you also create a temporal horizon that allows you to post your posts regularly. It is important to be aware of the times when your target group is most active in order to get the maximum engagement.

A well-structured editorial plan also ensures that your marketing team maintains an overview even when managing several channels at once, promptly identifies gaps, and can independently make optimizations. As a general rule at the beginning: Trying out different formats provides your audience with as much variation as possible and helps you to find out what works really well. Over time, you can then shift your format focus and adjust your editorial plan accordingly.

If you're really on point, you will conduct A/B tests to find out which posts work particularly well, where clicks are frequent, and which goals of your social media strategy the gained attention contributes to.

10. Community interaction

The art after gaining attention is keeping your audience and ensuring that they remain loyal to you. However, developing and posting your content is only half the rent to build sustainable and long-term customer relationships. A key factor here is community management.

The term social media didn't come out of nowhere. Just like in real life, actions, here in the form of posting posts, trigger reactions from users, such as liking, sharing, or commenting on your posts. Since the focus here is on the exchange and social media is not a one-way street, it is crucial to take the needs of your audience seriously and respond accordingly.

This is not just about quickly processing questions, praise, and criticism. It's more about having direct dialogue with your followers. Involve them in voting or surveys relevant to your target group, for example, or share content from your community directly in your feed and ensure that you are all part of the whole.

The biggest advantage of community management is that the closer you are to your audience, the better you get to know them. Which in turn ensures that you can tailor your content even more precisely to the users.

How can the success of social media optimization be checked?

And what did all this achieve? In the end, the question is always what all the adjustments and optimizations have actually brought, because not only time but also money were spent on it. The good thing about the digital age: success is actually measurable.

With the help of various analysis tools, which we will look at in more detail below, you can very accurately check the performance of your social media strategy. Depending on the objective, various key figures are significant: if users should engage with you and your brand, then probably the click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), and dwell time are key. On the other hand, if you want to generate reach and maintain your brand's image, then you should look at impressions, the number of followers, and interactions. If you're looking to generate leads, then focus on conversions.

No matter where your focus is in the end, a Social Media Analysis is an absolute must. Continuously question what you do, what your strategy is, and where you want to go. Just because something has been going well for a long time, doesn't mean it has to be set in stone and remain that way forever. Changes require courage and a quick reaction. This is the only way to save costs and increase the efficiency of your campaign.

The analysis should therefore become a continuous process. Simplify the whole thing by setting up an analysis dashboard and save yourself going through individual channels. This can quickly lead to errors and misunderstandings and only brings limited insights for your optimal strategy. On the other hand, a dashboard, like an editorial plan, combines all your channels and enables a pragmatic assessment of which campaigns were actually successful.

Which tools support you in Social Media Optimization?

If you are managing multiple social media channels, it can quickly become confusing. To keep a better overview and to measure the actual success of posts, you can now use a lot of useful social media tools. Take a look at OMR Reviews in the Social Media Suites-category.

Three types are generally differentiated:

1. Social Media Management Tools

Management tools can help to respond to messages faster, schedule posts, do cross-posting, and track content performance.

Sprout Social: This tool is suitable for both small and large companies and allows for management of internal processes as well as the maintenance of customer relations. A major advantage is the free trial version, before you choose a package to suit your needs.

Hootsuite: With this tool, you can plan posts, manage internal processes, and analyze data. It supports the majority of common platforms. There is also a free trial version before you can put together an individual package.

Agorapulse: Unlike Sprout Social and Hootsuite, Agorapulse additionally offers a Social Inbox, which can be used to manage and reply to all incoming messages from social media. Here, there is a free trial period of 30 days, after which a suitable package can be selected.

2. Social Media Analysis Tools

These tools primarily serve to assess your strategies and campaigns that are implemented on various platforms. For instance, you can compare interactions and reach, and find out the best times to post on social media.

Keyhole: With this tool, you can analyze Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts and represent them in clear graphs, making it easier to record and track data especially for starters.

Quintly: Here, you can view all insights in one place and compare the individual performances of the platforms at a glance. It supports Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Sendible: With Sendible you can plan and publish content as well as measure its performance. Before posts are published, they can be previewed on the respective platform. Moreover, you can plan in advance responses to comments and messages as well as hashtags.

3. Market Research Tools

These tools are particularly important when you want to find out which topics are most interesting to users on social media.

BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo shows highly shared content for certain keywords, which gives insight into what is currently in demand with users on social media.

Tweepsmap: This tool is specifically oriented towards Twitter and it identifies popular topics currently, with the geographic level going as far down as cities. Location-based analysis greatly supports the timing of content posting. This can significantly increase both the engagement rate and reach.

In order to assemble the right mix of tools for you, you should consider in advance which of these are really useful for achieving your set goals. A good reference point: the more channels you have to manage and the larger the team involved, the more a social media tool should be able to do.

Conclusion on social media optimization

In conclusion, it can be said that in the online world, a well-thought-out social media optimization makes it possible for companies to present their own website, business, and content even better on social platforms. This not only increases reach, but also improves the image, generates leads and stimulates sales of own products and services.

Numerous different tools can help to optimally prepare both the content and the entire internet presence, organize it, check and analyze it. Along with SEO and SEA, SMO is also becoming an important and indispensable aspect of every successful marketing strategy – including yours.