While content and digital marketers have spent years honing search engine optimization into a fine art, most companies have actually devoted considerable efforts and resources to ensuring their SEO techniques are top-notch. While SEO is indispensable in increasing brand awareness online, there is another relatively newer technique that is equally as valuable Social Media Optimization. Also, known as SMO, social media optimization is an ever-growing buzzword in 2017 in the online marketing world. These 5 social media optimization tips will hopefully come in handy to whatever it is you are trying to promote. So what is SMO exactly? It simply refers to optimizing a website or landing page and the content on it to encourage sharing of links across social networking platforms.
The idea behind social media optimization is really quite simple. It is to ensure a website or web page receives additional links to highly visible and popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. With that, the website or landing page must undergo changes around its content, its call-to-action messaging, meta tags, keywords and all media rich elements with the goal in mind to better engage your readership. According to reliable statistics, there are currently more than 3 billion people who have registered with at least one social media site globally. Half of these people log into social media at least once daily; this makes social media an indispensable marketing tool for any site that wants to enhance its online visibility.
Most search engines such as Google, Bing and even sites such as Scour.com have started incorporating social actions into their search results. So what does this mean to you? Simple! In the next decade, you will have to fight tooth and nail to ensure the content you create online is more endorsable, shareable, tweetable and more likeable than content from anyone else in your niche.
No matter how impressive your content is, it will not receive any traffic unless the people you are targeting engage with it through liking, commenting and sharing. The only way to generate interest and retain readers’ interest is to make your content engagement-friendly, relevant to your target audience and timed perfectly for maximum effect. You can do this through the following ways:
a. Write Persuasive Content
Make sure to write compelling content that is very relevant to your target audience, released in a timely manner, perhaps even controversial. Due diligence by making sure that your content uses proper grammar and sentence structure and of course correct spelling! Again, the goal is maximum user engagement so keep that in mind when crafting together your content.
b. Add Content on a Regular Basis
Continually add in fresh content to your site on a regular basis because most social media networks quickly archive posts within hours after it becomes published. And by continually posting new content, your visitors will keep coming back to learn about new insights within your field of expertise. Set up an editorial calendar for your posts on a weekly basis and build out content that is trending, popular and what your target audience wants to hear. Above all else, always ensure that you never jeopardize quality for quantity when posting content so make sure to push out content that is unique and high readability score.
c. Add Media-rich Elements to Your Pages
Visual content that is more engaging, catchy and appealing will always spark more interest with most audiences so don’t be shy about adding in photos, embedded videos and infographics or other forms of media as a part of your content. All social media platforms have plenty of tools that enable incorporating multimedia content. Working media into your content marketing strategy makes your profile more interesting, memorable and engaging for readers.
