3 Easy Ways to Level Up Your Social Media

In order for a business to have a long-term, successful online presence, it’s important to have a robust overall digital strategy that includes search engine optimization and social media optimization (among other things). While none of us at UpBuild are experts in social media, we do see the impact and support social media provides to SEO on a daily basis.

How Social Media Affects SEO and Why It’s Important

The relationship between SEO and social media has always been complicated. As mentioned in our previous post, The Power of Social, social media doesn’t directly affect a website’s rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, social media does play something of a supportive role when it comes to SEO. It can help drive more traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, and allow additional avenues for sharing content, which may result in new, relevant inbound links that do in fact impact performance in the SERPs.

We want to make sure businesses have all the information they need to optimize their digital presence, so here are a few tips for leveling up your social media presence as part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

Create a Thorough Content Strategy and Begin Curating Content

When attempting to level up your social media, it’s important to go about it with a plan, and that starts with a cohesive content strategy. First, you will have to identify what your specific goals are for each social media platform. For instance, driving referral traffic could be your goal for Facebook, increasing product sales for Instagram, and your goal on LinkedIn could be expanding business contacts. Next, it’s important to decide what your voice will be across all platforms. Will you reach your audience best by sounding very proper and formal? Or do you think your audience will respond better to a voice that is more relatable and friendly. Keep in mind who your audience is and what they are interested in. Once you have your overall strategy figured out, you can begin curating content. 

We recommend posting on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn a minimum of 3 times per week, but for other platforms like Instagram we recommend posting 1-3 times per day. On Twitter, we encourage you to tweet even more often at about 4 -5 times per day since tweets are short snippets that get rapidly pushed down by new content. Try to keep the tweets spaced out over the hours when your target audience is most likely to be online (a tool like Buffer can help with that). All of these different posting schedules can be a lot to keep track of, so we highly recommend creating a social media content calendar to ensure that you are posting regularly on each platform. 

Seek out different forms of media when curating content. When we say ‘curating content,’ we mean gathering content that you not only created, but also gathering content created by other people that relates to your brand that your users might find interesting or useful. Include photos, gifs, and especially videos when gathering content, and schedule the different pieces of content out on a content calendar.  Mix up content types like statistics, infographics, testimonials, or reviews, as these are all great ways to engage followers and make them more interested in your products and services.

Making sure that curated content is consistently shared with your target audience will help you develop a following on social media. People will begin to engage with the content you post and share the content with their own followers. Ultimately, more users will see your posts, those users can then be directed to your website, and then they can begin to interact with the content on your site as well as on social media

Utilize the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Business

Not every business should be on every social media platform. It’s important to dedicate your time and effort into a platform that attracts your target audience. For example, if you’re a business selling something creative like fashion or interior design, you might find that your audience is mostly on Instagram or Pinterest, as those are very visual-heavy platforms where many people go to find creative inspiration. However, your efforts might not go as far on a platform like LinkedIn, for instance, because LinkedIn is intended more for professional B2B or B2C connections. When you are trying to decide which social media platforms are actually the most valuable to you, consider who your target audience is and where they spend most of their time.

Promote Your Social Media

There are many different ways to promote your social media, but one of the most important is to use relevant hashtags. Social media platforms have become search tools in and of themselves. Hashtags are one of the many ways content is categorized, making it easier for people to find you. However, different platforms recommend different amounts of hashtags in order for a post to be successful, and they appear in different ways. For example, the social media management platform Hootsuite recommends that users list 1-2 hashtags on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but you can use up to 5-10 hashtags on Instagram without putting users off, as long as they are all relevant and targeted to your niche audience.

We also encourage sharing an article or post more than once, as this is another great way to promote your content on social media. Sharing content more than once can increase its ability to be seen and drive engagement, but sometimes content can expire and become irrelevant to an industry rather quickly, so be aware of which content you’re sharing. Ensure your relevant posts are being shared multiple times by re-sharing your top rated, evergreen content across your social media platforms. It can also be beneficial to devote a small budget to promoting your best content via paid social media such as Facebook or Instagram ads. 

Lastly, share your content with calls to action. When posting content on social media, it’s important to encourage people to engage with your brand. Try creating a few posts that include a poll, contest, or giveaway. This will inspire people to comment on your content and share it with their friends, ultimately sending more people to your social media pages. Be sure to include a link to your website in your bio on every social media platform. That way, when these users do make it to your social media pages, they have easy access to your site and you can start to see more traffic and interactions on your website that hopefully end in goal conversions.

Keep Marketing and Evolving

Social media platforms are ever-changing. Staying on top of new trends and new platforms can often be helpful in growing your audience and engaging with more people. While these suggestions just scratch the surface when it comes to social media marketing, hopefully these tips will bring more traffic to your site, help your site build more authority, potentially earn you more inbound links, and increase your rank in the SERPs.