Social media marketing can exponentially improve the visibility of your business. A new wave of marketing is hitting the business world, and it is more reflective of today’s new Internet trends. Comparable to the more mainstream search engine optimization (SEO), social media optimization (SMO) is something that you may already be practicing daily without even being aware of the term.
Here are a few examples of social media optimization (SMO):
- Deciding on specific media format to appeal to your audience (i.e. videos versus images).
- Including “Share” buttons on your posts to ensure that your material can be shared with others.
- Viewing your website’s trends and determining when your readers are most likely to see and respond to your posts.
- Successful business owners are aware of the benefits that business social media accounts can offer, but SMO takes this technique to another level to actually increase company awareness and reach a new market of clients, customers, or business partners.
It is best to consider industry trends and what has worked best for your company when making your posts as shareable as possible.
By ensuring that your content is high-quality is an important aspect of SMO. Your website visitors will acknowledge the quality of your material and will be more likely to share it with their followers via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on.
Similar to SEO and how it increases your organic search visibility, this social networking version generates more buzz to your website, in addition to referral traffic, inbound links, and strong social signals.
Headlines are not to be taken for granted. Attention-grabbing headlines are what draw a person into reading articles.
If the headline is catchy, the viewer is more likely to click on the article, share, and comment. This aspect of SEO requires the understanding of your audience. You know what your audience likes, so it would be wise to take advantage of that.
Regarding social media headlines, blog post titles, descriptions, and opening lines for blog posts are the subject. On Twitter, headlines are referring to the entire 140 characters of a tweet.
You can write the best article to ever grace the Internet, but with a bad headline, your post can easily be looked over and get lost in the pile of irrelevant and forgotten links.
Here are some headline rules you can follow:
- Using numbers for your headlines never fails. These types of headlines are associated with the most read and shared blog posts to date. You can make a list post with the headline (“6 Ways to Improve Your Business”), or you can just simply include a number in the title (“The #1 Entrepreneurial Secret”).
- Make your headline clear with a tangible benefit of reading (e.g. “5 Tricks for Immediately Decreasing Stress and Living a Happy Life”).Choose one unique angle that you believe will affect your readers. For example, “Singing Tips that Beyoncé Will Never Share”
- Optimizing your social media profiles, including a call to action on your posts (“Please Retweet”), and utilizing social media trends (e.g. hashtags) are some of the most effective ways to take advantage of SMO.
These tips are a good start to delve into SMO, but the possibilities are endless. It may be in good practice to test out a variety of strategies and determine which techniques work the best for your company and the goal that you’re trying to reach.