Social media has a mind of its own. One day, your posts get a ton of engagement, shares and comments. The next day, your posts fall flat. Why? Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer. Countless variables affect each post’s success, and mastering social media can take years.
Luckily for you, we’re breaking down five simple strategies that you should follow to optimize your social media posts and gain maximum exposure.
Five Strategies for Optimizing Your Posts
1. Use keywords within your social media posts
When you think of keywords, social media likely does not come to mind. But, keywords play a big part in how your posts get found by both the Google search engine and when people search for things within the Facebook search bar.
Due to the text-based nature of many social media channels, using precise language and carefully choosing keywords is of the utmost importance.
This is especially vital on Twitter, where you are limited to 280 characters per post. If you can fit a keyword into the main text of your post, that’s perfect. Otherwise, adding a hashtagged keyword to the end of your post is the way to go.
Knowing what keywords are trending or popular can also help you make an informed decision on what kind of content to post.
2. Continue your social media strategy with links
Links are at the forefront of any traffic strategy and should be used within any social media post.
Adding a hyperlink into your post content can bridge the gap between your social media presence and your website. You can share additional information with users, direct them to a contact form, send them directly to a product page or any other part of your site.
With some platforms, like Twitter, your link will be shortened to fit the limited number of characters. Even on social media platforms without character limits, shortening your link with a service like bit.ly or Ow.ly can be a good practice to minimize clutter in your post.
3. Tag others to gain more engagement
An amazing way to increase engagement is to tag other users, pages or businesses in your post.
Maybe you’ve partnered with a local organization and want to give them some recognition. Or maybe one of your customers has engaged with you in the comments of a post and you want to acknowledge them by name.
As soon as you tag someone, the users will be notified of the tag and may be open to a public dialogue, which can be beneficial for your brand if all goes well.
4. Create images that are easily seen on all devices
The brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, making images one of the best tools in your arsenal for increasing engagement.
Depending on the social media platform, your images will be displayed in different aspect ratios and sizes, and thumbnail views may crop out some parts of your image.
Always review your images in as many forms as possible: thumbnail view, full-screen view, on a desktop browser and on mobile devices. With mobile browsing becoming more and more popular, it’s vital that your content is displayed properly on phones.
5. Try video over images, and images over text
It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that businesses are now going above and beyond to drive video engagement and get more videos created. In fact, every day over 8 billion video views happen on Facebook, and 1 billion hours of videos are watched on YouTube.
If your text posts are not gaining the engagement, clicks or shares you had hoped for, try creating an image with that text or using a video.
Social media posts all come down to testing. With marketing, you never stop testing. Sometimes things don’t work, but sometimes they get #viral status!
Ready to take your social media posts to the next level?
At Dream Local Digital, our marketing strategists and editors have years of experience crafting effective social media posts for a wide range of businesses. Let us help you discover what makes a perfect social media post for you and your business goals. Contact us today for a free consultation.
