10 Tips to help optimise your social content

If you’ve got a serious content marketing strategy, then you’re going to want to pair that with equally strong social promotion. After all, what is the point of producing content if it isn’t going to be shared? However, if you are going to be sharing your content and promoting your business on social media, you must make sure you are doing so correctly. Having an incorrect social media strategy will mean you won’t gain any shares and risk damaging the reputation of your business.

Here are 10 tips you should use to optimize your social content:

1. Keep headlines short and interesting

When you’re trying to make someone interested in your content, you don’t want to have a long, convoluted headline. This is especially important if you’re sharing your content on social media platforms such as Twitter. There’s only 140 characters, you don’t want to end up with half your headline cut off. So remember to keep your headlines short and snappy. You need to be able to create a hook for readers. With so much content, what is going to make a reader click on your content? Make sure your headline is interesting enough to compel a reader to not only click on it, but share it as well.

2. Post frequently

If you’re not boosting your social media posts through ads, then you will be purely relying on organic traffic. When you’re not paying for your posts to be promoted on to users timelines and news feeds, it’s easy for it to end up lost amongst all the other posts. This means you have to post frequently enough to ensure you’ll be seen by your target audience. However, you don’t want to post too often and come across as spammy.

Here is a guide for how often you should post per day to gain the most benefit:

• Facebook: 1 post per day to ensure you don’t appear spammy
• Twitter: 15 tweets per day. Most retweets occur within an hour of the tweet, so it’s best to continually tweet throughout the day.
• Instagram: share 1 or 2 posts per day, ensuring the posts are relevant and beneficial to your audience.
• LinkedIn: publish 1 post between 10-11am for maximum exposure.

3. Schedule your posts

Set up a scheduler to ensure your posts are always going out, even when you’re busy. This will mean you have no excuse to not post on your business’ social media platforms daily. Make sure your posts are appropriately staggered throughout the day to avoid them all being published at the same time.

Some tools worth using include:

• Buffer: this is a simple, easy to use app, which can be used on both mobile devices and desktops. The app allows you to simply clip links, photos, videos or just plain text. A buffer collects all the tweets and releases them in a slow pace. This works for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Depending how many social media accounts you want to use, prices range from free to $399 per month.
• Postcron: use this program to schedule posts across all major social media platforms. You can even schedule posts directly from an Excel or Google Doc file. Prices range from $8.33 per month through to $83.33 per month, billed annually.
• Everypost: this tool has a simple interface, meaning everyone will be able to understand how to use it. Everypost offers five plans, ranging from free to $99.99 per month.
• Hootsuite: this is one of the best known social media management tools. Simply link up the social media accounts you want to use. Next just choose the channel you want to post to, or post your content to all channels. This will give you details such as the length of your post.Prices range from free to $139.99 per month, with custom pricing offered for enterprises.

4. Make sure your content is shareable

When you’re sharing your posts on social media, there’s one important thing you should always consider - will people actually want to share this? There’s a few ways you can raise the interest of you social media posts. One of the easiest ways to do this is by making it visually interesting.

Always include a photograph or video with your posts. In fact, visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social networks, and will get 94% more total views. Visual aids make posts more interesting, while readers will find it easier to retain information. Buffer found tweets will get 150% more retweets if an image is included.

5. Consider your brand personality

You don’t want to just write anything on social media. You have to consider whether what you’re sharing and writing is in line with your brand’s personality. If you’re a corporate organisation, it’s less likely that you’re going to constantly be sharing memes. However, if you’re targeting a younger audience, this type of content may be more appropriate. When trying to establish and keep a consistent brand personality, keep in mind a few things:

• Who are you trying to target?
• What does our target audience find interesting?
• What do we want to be known for?
• Which social media platform does our target audience use most frequently?

When posting, make sure your posts always have the same voice, and that this voice is consistent with your website and brand.

6. Optimize for keywords

When you’re writing your social media posts, remember to keep your keywords and target key phrases in mind. However, it’s important to make sure inserting keywords looks natural. You still want your posts to make sense and not make the keyword look obvious or out of place.

The keywords are going to be words that you can use to describe your business or words that your company is associated with. Make sure to also check what keywords or phrases your competition is using. This will help you to refine what keywords you use to stand out from the crowd.

On social media, you’re going to want to use keywords wherever possible. Places to use keywords include:

• In headlines
• In photograph captions
• In hashtags
• In your business’ summary or “about” section

Remember to undertake keyword research to ensure you’re using the right words. Keywords may also vary for different social media platforms - LinkedIn is always going to be more geared towards jobs and employment.

7. Don’t self-promote

Readers are more likely to click on a link if it is something that benefits them. Can they gain a deeper understanding of a topic by reading your blog post? Or are they just going to learn more about your business? Enchanting Marketing describes this as features and benefits. You want to write about the benefits of your product or service to the reader, not just the features of your business.

Remember to write about how the reader can save time, money, improve their skills or become more productive. Doing this will mean you will be able to gain more traction than if all your posts are self-promotion.

8. Share buttons

If you’re trying to get your content shared, make sure the reader is easily able to do so. There is nothing worse than wanting to share an article and having to scan the entire page to find where the share button is. Make sure you not only include social media share buttons on all of your content, but also ensure they are easily accessible.

There are many benefits to include share buttons on your blog, including:

• Increase brand exposure: share buttons means your content is easily able to be shared to numerous social media platforms. This could expose your brand to a potential new customer.
• Improve the user experience: you want your customers to associate your website with a good customer experience. Make your blog as easy to navigate as possible. This includes placing the share buttons in obvious places, such as near the title or author’s name, and at the end of the article.
• Increase traffic: as you increase your exposure, you can also expect to see an increase in traffic to your website. If people are reading your blog post and find it useful, they may also be compelled to browse your website to see if your business can help them.
• Social signals: the more people that share your article, the more chance you have of your page ranking on a search engine.

Remember to experiment with different styles and placements of share buttons to see which one works best for your page.

9. Ask Questions

Sometimes the best way to elicit a response is to simply ask. People are more likely to respond to a question rather than a statement. This also gives you the opportunity to engage with your audience. If you get responses to the question you have posted on your status, remember to reply. People have taken the time to write a response and will appreciate a reply or even just a ‘like’ from your company.

10. Measure your results

One of the most important things you need to do is measure your results. After all, how do you know if your social media strategy is actually working if you’re not measuring it? Measuring metrics allows you to see if your strategy is working and allow you to change or improve what’s not working.

So what should you be measuring? Here are a few metrics to get you started:

• Click through rate: this will allow you to know if people are actually clicking on your content.
• Bounce rate: did people click on the link and then quickly leave your website? Compare the bounce rate for social media to the rate of people who visited directly from a search engine or from a paid advertising campaign.
• Mentions: the more mentions, the stronger your social signal will be. It’s important to see how many people are sharing and mentioning your content.
• Comments: track the amount of comments your posts receive, but remember to measure this in context. How many comments do you receive per post to the number of overall followers? This will give you the percentage of your existing audience that commented on the post.

How do you measure these? There are several useful tools you can use which will help you measure your social media ROI, including:

• Kissmetrics
• Customer Life Value
• RJMetrics
• Cyfe

You can also use tools that already exist within each social media platform, such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics.

These tips will ensure you are able to have an improved social media strategy and hopefully increase your ROI.