The power of social media has been proven time and again. It really does work to attract many more people to a business, product or service. It’s even been successfully used to advertise sweepstakes and concerts, promotional events and just about everything and anything in between. Optimizing social media channels – so that they can enjoy improved performance and generate the amount of desirable organic traffic – is instrumental in harnessing the full and unabated power of the social media platforms of today. Furthermore, using social media optimization to your advantage is a powerful tool that can propel an entity forwards into a very prosperous future.
But how do you go about optimizing social media channels? Why is it important? And what can you expect as a result for your efforts?
Before we dig in, it’s good to mention a few of the big social media channels. Four that immediately come to mind include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Posterous. The importance of Posterous is that you can auto-post to several other social media sites – including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress – at the click of a button, making it an invaluable social media resource. It’s always of good mind to have several channels set up so you can attract surfers and searchers on all of the large sites. This will exponentially increase your traffic, organic back links, exposure and rankings, and rather expeditiously at that.
Common Social Media Optimization Strategies
On all of the aforementioned social media websites, you can place daily posts that track URLs from news feeds, RSS feeds, websites, videos, or even articles or blogs that you have personally authored and syndicated. This allows you to tag the articles with relevant keywords that can be hyperlinked back to the primary domain of your entity. The power of doing this on social media channels is that these sites were designed to essentially mimic the major search engines; in the sense that their searches work in a similar manner and that engines, like Google, favor content that is proliferated from these sites.
Here’s a breakdown of some strategies that are prevalent and ongoing:
- Creating articles/press releases and distributing them via content networks and then pushing out to your social media channels
- Creating back links using relevant keywords and content to drive traffic to primary domains
- Attracting more people to the company, product or service from direct social media searches
- Progressively maintaining and projecting a positive image to the masses online and securing branding
- Managing reputation through the maintenance of relatable positive content
Behold: The Power of Social Media Optimization
A good example of how powerful social media optimization is can be offered by a gentleman named Daniel Tynski, who had a client create a simple SEO filler article, distribute it and syndicate it on Digg (a popular social media channel); the article was about social media. Over the course of just a week, the article generated more than 3,000 back links and received over 530 links coming in from another similar social media site, del.icio.us. As a result it skyrocketed up the Alexa rankings.
Actively Managing Your Social Media Channels
Much like any marketing effort, maintenance and consistency is the key, not to mention always providing high quality content. Once profiles have been set up on the desired social media channels, a variety of daily maintenance tasks are essential to taking full advantage of social media optimization. These include adding content, using the appropriate keywords and links to increase your followers on your social media channels.
If you have a fan page on Facebook, for example, and it has grown to a sizable number, interlinking your social media channels by inviting Facebook fans or Twitter followers to those channels will yield tremendous results and social media growth.
Key to Harnessing the Power of Content
Lastly, your message is only as powerful as you make it. Don’t use filler content or keyword-stuffed content thinking that it will give you an advantage, because it won’t. Rather, consistently creating content that relates to users and attracts them, and then populating the social media world with it, is the best way to use social media optimization to your advantage. One of the surest routes of continuously achieving this is to add “Share” buttons to all of the content that you post on the main domain that is planned for social media syndication. If the content is compelling, engaging, relevant and unique, it will automatically attract the masses and generate increased consumer interest. This ultimately leads to conversion—which will vastly boost return on investment (ROI).