Five Steps to Social Media Optimisation

Over the last week, about three companies that I subscribe to have sent emails about Social Media Optimisation. They position it as something that business owners and leaders should be almost afraid of - it’s big, scary and mighty complex. But is it really? No. 

Social Media Optimisation has a few different perceived meanings. But the way we see it, it means, ‘using a range of social media platforms in the most effective, integrated way to achieve a business goal or objective.’

The goal could be to create awareness, direct more traffic to the website, sell a product or create leads - but it all works in the same way. So how can business leaders and entrepreneurs use achieve social media optimisation simply? Follow our guide and you’ll find it easy! 

 

Step One: Select your social media platforms wisely

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, Vine, Youtube, Snapchat, Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare, Goodreads, LinkedIn and the list goes on! Selecting your social media sites is simple - work out where your ideal clients are hanging out online and make those your priority. If you’re not sure what they use, the information is pretty widely available. This great article from Sprout Social can help. 

 

Step Two: Brand yourself consistently

Make your handle or username the same across all platforms. Make your social logo the same across all platforms. For example, Langano Business Strategists use “Langano Business Strategists” for all of our social media and we only have our icon as the image, not the full logo. Make sure that your messaging is consistent across the platforms so if you want to position yourself as an industry thought leader, make sure your messages reflect this. If you want to position yourself as a fun, exciting brand, change your tone to reflect this. Image styling is also important and we’ll cover that in detail one day soon, but for now just make sure that you use something like www.canva.com to overlay your logo in the corner of images. 

 

Step Three: Make yourself searchable

Different platforms use different things to make themselves searchable on social media. Hashtags, key words and categories. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to use these. Think about your elevator pitch - what are the key words throughout it? Those words plus perhaps one location relevant word are what you should be using in hashtags and keywords. For example, ours at Langano Business Strategists would be #financialmanagement #leadership #business #strategy #businessgrowth #entrepreneurs #brisbane 

 

Step Four: Don’t settle for OK content, make it great instead

When you think about what you want to share publicly, make that content great. Make it empowering, inspiring, educational, informative and motivating. A way to measure a content idea is to ask yourself, “will the reader or viewer feel something when they look at this?” if you can create an emotive connection, it will be more powerful than anything else you could post. 

 

Step Five: Manage it well

Whoever is in charge of social media optimisation, be it yourself or someone else, can do a few things to make it a much simpler process. Start by allocating time each week to social media. This means it’s done once a week and is automated throughout the rest of the week. Tools like Hootsuite and Latergram can make scheduling your posts across all platforms very streamlined. It also pulls in analytics from each platform and presents them very nicely for you so measuring progress is a breeze. 

 

So with five simple and easy to do steps, social media optimisation is very achievable and something every business that wants to use social media should do!