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Social media has revolutionized business marketing and performance more than anyone could have imagined. When I think back to the original creation of my Facebook account and how excited I was to connect with a few friends from high school and college … compared to what it has become today, it’s so hard to believe! But, with the exponential growth of social media users, it’s more important than ever to optimize your social media accounts.
Currently, over 4 billion social media users in the world spend an average of 2.5 hours on their favorite social media platforms every day. Marketing experts like me will talk to you about the importance of knowing who your target audience is, so you can properly find and market to them online. No matter who you are trying to reach, it is likely they are online in some way or another.
Having a social media marketing strategy as part of your overall marketing plan is essential, but one piece of that is to make sure you optimize your social media accounts.
How to Optimize Your Social Media Accounts
Set the Profile Photo
People want to do business with people. It’s important to set your profile photo and/or banner image in a way that highlights the person (or people) behind your brand. If you are a sole proprietor, you should use a professional photo of yourself. If you have a team or small business, you could use your company logo as the profile photo but find a way to highlight your management team or feature employees in your banner photo. Show your followers who they will be working with when they do business with your company! Also, make sure you are also finding ways to incorporate you and your team into your social media content on an ongoing basis.
Write and Update Your Business Bio
New visitors to your social media account will read your business bio to learn more about you. Different platforms have different character length limits. Regardless of the platform, you want to make it short and informative but impactful. You can also add keywords in your bio to help you appear in your target audience’s searches. You can see how I do my Instagram bio here (and give me a follow if you’d like!)
Make Sure Your Information is Complete
Each social media platform gives you a number of options for entering your information. We already talked about the profile or page photo. Other common fields include website address, email address, phone number, business category, and address. These may not apply to all of you, but if they do – fill in that information! Facebook has even more options like services, hours of operation, and more. If they give you the opportunity to put information in a field, fill it in!
Optimize Your Social Media on the Personal Side, Too
Make sure you optimize your social media personal accounts where applicable as well. This is especially important on Facebook, where everyone who manages a business page is required to have a personal profile. Have a photo on your personal profile, and connect your businesses to the page. As you are networking in Facebook groups, this will let people see what you do without you having to tell them. On Instagram or Twitter, you can also tag your business page in your personal bio to direct people to your business page. The goal is always to make it easy for people to buy from you.
Use Hashtags
Don’t forget to use hashtags on your social media content! Hashtags are a simple and effective way to increase your reach on social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Hashtags can help make your social media content visible to potential new followers who may be following or searching those hashtags. If you have used hashtags on a recent Instagram post, you can look at the insights for that post to see how much of your reach was due to hashtags being used.
Follow a Content Marketing Strategy
Having a content marketing plan and following it consistently is the key to success with social media marketing. Your content should remain relevant to your brand and should resonate with your reader. Though everyone’s ultimate goal is to generate sales, it’s important to provide a mix of value and entertainment posts among your promotional posts. Your followers need a reason to follow you, and if you are always trying to SELL SELL SELL, they will unfollow.
The recommendation on this varies, but I think a good rule of thumb is to have a promotional post one out of every six posts or so. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t put a call to action of some sort at the end of your value posts, too. This also may vary depending on your business. A retail store is likely going to have more promotional posts because that’s what they do and that’s why people are following them. Just try to think about your strategy from your followers’ perspective, and that should help you find your magic number.
Select Your Social Platforms
It’s important to remember that your business doesn’t have to have a presence on every single social platform. Different platforms have different audience demographics. Once you figure out where your audience is hanging out, you can focus your attention on those platforms. It’s easy to feel like we are missing out on opportunities by not being everywhere. But, it’s better to do one or a few platforms consistently than it is to try to be everywhere.
