With over 3 billion users around the world, social media is pretty much the most popular thing since sliced bread. From selfies and food to career moves and marketing posts, absolutely everything has been documented across the broad array of popular networks.
It’s also the only place where a green leaf salad can attract more attention than your wedding photos. #oops
So what has that lettuce leaf got that your marketing posts haven’t? Whether you’re posting company updates to Twitter or lead generation posts on LinkedIn, your success isn’t always down to the subject of the post but the tricks you use to optimise it.
The importance of social media optimisation
With social distribution key to content promotion, it’s no secret that social media is central to effective inbound marketing. Your buyer persona research can be helpful for informing your social media targeting and which platform to use, while a closer look at the buyer’s journey can really shape the messaging you put out with each post.
But as we start to look more and more at delighting and retaining our customers, it’s important to recognise that your social channels can also be an awesome way of managing and improving customer satisfaction.
71% of consumers recommend a brand after having a good social media service experience with them, highlighting your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn channel’s potential for reaffirming your brand as one your prospects and customers alike love to engage with and buy from.
Learn all about why social media is an important part of inbound marketing.
5 social media optimisation techniques
Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all quick, simple to use, and a great way to interact with your customers. But rather than filling your character limits with just plain text, there are a number of ways to adapt posts:
1. #Hashtags
These enhance your content by highlighting keywords, resulting in increased discoverability when people search for the keyword in the built-in search bar. Keep the hashtag simple and relevant to the post topic, but also make it unique as opposed to ‘#marketing’ or ‘#content’, which will gather far greater competition from other tweets during the day. Restrict your post to one or two hashtags at most, as too many can become overpowering. On average, Twitter posts that include hashtags receive 16% more retweets.
2. Images
Use imagery to make your post more eye-catching and unique. Choose an image relevant to the topic. If you haven’t taken it yourself, it’s vital to use freely sourced images or paid images — you don’t want to be done for copyright. Using yearly subscription accounts like Canva allows you to create your own image in any way, shape, or form you wish, adding a touch of personalisation to the post. Typically, Facebook posts including photos receive 39% more interaction, whilst on Twitter, an image accompanying post receives 35% more retweets.
3. Emojis
These are a fun and modern addition to all posts. I find using emojis alongside your text makes it more human, but it’s important to make sure they’re suitable for the platform and purpose you’re using them for. (Probably not one for LinkedIn…) With hundreds of emojis to choose from, you can really express your feelings towards the topic in question. Again, don’t overload your post and, of course, make sure they’re suitable for work. (I’m looking at you, aubergine.) An article published back in 2013 showed that comments increased by 33% on Facebook posts including an emoji — that deserves a :)
4. Opinion polls
From personal experience, these give the greatest engagement rates. A source of direct communication with your customers, it allows them to voice their opinions and feel valued in the feedback they provide. You can choose the question, answers, and even the expiry date of the poll. Live statistics also show the current status for each answer(s) and provide a stepping stone for your audience to interact with each other.
5. Tagging
This increases circulation and a chance to gain traffic to your site from customers who are not necessarily using your services. Tagging other businesses relevant to the topic will broaden the reach of your post, and hopefully, that business will share your post too. For example, if you’re a small IT firm and have an interesting post about Microsoft, tagging the technology giants could lead to a greater audience from whoever is reading their posts. Obviously, avoid tagging competitors.
Free — and paid — social media optimisation tools
Social media activity is fundamental to inbound marketing success, but making sure your team stays on top of it can be time-consuming. With this in mind, there’s a whole range of tools you can get on board with to really drive your campaign’s social media performance.
If you’re watching the department’s pennies, Hootsuite offers a free trial enabling you to test their social scheduling capabilities, allowing you to line up a series of posts across channels, in effect tackling all your social media for a given period of time at once. (Hello, efficiency.) By scheduling posts for future publication, you can better target specific customers within different regional time zones, too.
Design Wizard is another content creation tool you can use. Design Wizard is an alternative to Canva which allows you to create high-quality, impressive images and videos quickly and easily. Standout features of the tool include a custom colour palette, free font library, and a 'resize' feature.
Don't miss: 5 Quick Wins for Social Media Scheduling with HubSpot
Finding the right social media platform for you
As an Elite HubSpot Solutions partner, we’d be remiss not to recommend sales and marketing platform HubSpot’s social media tools
Alongside its inbound marketing capabilities, HubSpot Marketing Hub enables you to:
- monitor brand mentions and relevant conversations
- track engagements automatically
- schedule your social posts to be published when the right people will see them
It's then simple to manage all your team's activity via one central hub of results using the analytics dashboard included in the software. Social media reporting just got a lot easier!
So there we have it: a few tips and tricks I find useful when optimising my social media posts. Relevant, minimalistic, and target market are the three terms you need to think about when planning your posts, but get on board with these and watch the social conversations flow.
Learn more about the crucial role social media plays in inbound success by downloading our free guide to content strategy and implementation — click the image below for your free copy.
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