Social Media Optimization: Learn the Strategy, Grow Your Business!
Social media never fails to attract public interest and attention. Furthermore, social media is a perfect space to build the brand awareness, product engagement, and business growth (as it has mentioned in the title). But, optimization without knowing its concept and marketing strategy can bring your business to nowhere.
And then, what does it mean by social media marketing? What are the social media platforms that suit to develop the business? What are the benefit and disbenefit of optimizing social media for business growth? What is the strategy to learn when it comes to business promotion?
If you are still questioning, the rest of this article must be helpful to you!
Social Media Optimization & Social Media Marketing
You might have noticed a saying, to optimize social media, we need an optimized marketing strategy. Those two terms, that’s often being shorten as SMO and SMM are completing each other. While social media optimization (SMO) is defined as a process of making accounts and contents visible and accessible for everyone, social media marketing (SMM) is a form of digital promotion to put your product or brand on spot using social media. Below is the example of how they are being used together.A business is introducing their new product. The form of their digital marketing is a short video. SMM will be organizing the way their product is being presented in their short video, whereas the SMO role is to think of the suitable platform to post and how the content appears on search engines later.
Many of social media platforms can be used as your tool to grow your business, but each of them need different strategies to plan. The same short video might not work the same in all the social media platforms you have. That is why SMO and SMM are inseparable.
Social Media Platforms for Business Development
Social media platforms appearing new over the year. As a business developer, it’s always important to update the track of most used platform, so that you can decide where to promote your brand and grow it up. Dangerously, when the social media usage is untracked, no one will notice your brand as they slowly leave the outdated platform and move to the hypes or trendies. However, below is the list of socials that have ever been used for growing business.Facebook allows anyone to post a selling product on their personal profile and groups. Facebook pages can be associated with store websites or any other platforms that lead people to your store. By using Facebook Ads, all data to your business will be tracked, so it’s easy to see if your promotion engages small or big amount of people. That helps you to improve your future promotion strategy, too.
Instagram is always known with its aesthetics. Aesthetics and interesting content edits are part of visual marketing. You can easily use instagram’s aesthetics and edit features to create advertisement and attract audience attention using any form; a single photo post, slided photo post, and creative reels. Aside from that, you can build enough trust by partnering with celebrities and influencers.
When promoting your business using Twitter, all you need to do as a start is changing your wording style in your promotion. For example, if you get get used to write a paragraph to persuade people, try to make it shorter into 4-5 powerful sentences only. Use Twitter for short promotions, along with the UGC (User Generated Content) hashtag, so the system notices your promotion post.
LinkedIn optimization starts by setting up your company profile, of course. Setting up a good profile can be done by providing informations like who you are, what you offer, where you are based, and adding some more details about your brand’. After having the right profile, business owners are allowed to create engaging contents as their post, just like the other social platforms.
LinkedIn doesn’t have any special rules for content formatting. You can post pictures, videos, 500-1000-worded articles, even PDF and powerpoint files, anything that make your products stand out. You can also make your company page more sociable by resharing the post you’re tagged in, or inviting any first-degree profile connections to follow you.
YouTube
Not only build for entertaining videos, YouTube is also a good platform to introduce the business you run. When promoting your brand using YouTube, create a business channel as a start. Try to make a nice title and attractive thumbnail for each of your videos.YouTube video has a box to write a description. Fill the video description with your business links, too. That way, people know how to find more information about all of your products and purchase them right away.
Note: pay attention to video durations. Long videos like over 6 mints length videos can be boring for YouTube audience since they consume a lot of time to watch. The longer duration it has, the more insightful explanation you need to add. Otherwise, people will go watch over the others.
TikTok
TikTok is basically a short video-sharing platform. Speaking of popular social media platforms, TikTok can never be forgotten from the list. Since 2022, its popularity has been increasing around the world. Over time, its function is not only for dancing and lip syncing, but even wider, for branding and advertising.TikTok also launched a TikTok Shop feature that allows sellers to do lifestream, promote their products, and let everyone to buy their items while watching the stream. Apparently, that feature makes online shopping more preferential to its users. By maximizing that feature and taking advantage of people’s preference, the opportunity to grow your business is there.
Just like most of the existing platforms, Pinterest requires you to create an online store and set up a business account first of all. You are also allowed to connect that business account to your personal account later. Or, if you don’t want to make two separated accounts, you can convert your personal account into business.
Strategy in Promoting Business on Social Media
As we know, social media has a function to attract potential clients and expanding business growth. However, promoting business on most used platforms needs a group of general strategy to consider. This is a list of strategies you need to know befor deciding which platform suits you best.Identify your target audience
Identifying target audience is not just finding their age range, interest, and gender. More than that, you must to know their problems and needs. After that, make your product as an offer to solve their problem. After knowing all the stuff, figure out which platform they mostly use and advertise your product there.Choose the most suitable platform to your audience range and your business image
Research, research, and research the suitable platform to your audience and your business image. Be careful at deciding where to place your market. Don’t feel forced to post on platforms that don’t match your business values just because of what your competitors do.Interesting content format and consistent posting schedule
What’s the most viewed on the platform you choose? Use the content format the users like. Be creative with the most viewed digital marketing form, but don’t forget to show them uniqueness from your promotion and brand.Once you figure all out, make a posting schedule. Post your content at times when your target audience is usually available. Then, be consistent with your posting schedule.
Search engine optimization, interaction with audience, and use paid ads
Enable your brand to be found by everyone. Use hashtags on your promotion post. Use the most searched hashtag.Your audience might drop questions about your product as a public comment on your promotion post. Reply to each of their questions. Explain as clear as you can.
Also, try to use paid ads. If you want to reach higher range of public interest, try using paid ads. You obviously need some budget for that.
Track and evaluate
Track your business monthly. Evaluate what should be improved, changed, or updated. Keep evaluating for a better business growth!Benefit and Disbenefit of Optimizing Social Media for Business
Social media is the most effective promotion tool to grow your business, other than email marketing. Knowing its benefit and disbenefit is necessary, however, so you can consider what to prepare before intending on developing your business using any of them. Below is the list of bbenefit and disbenefit you can read.Benefits
- Wide reach
- Segmented target audience
- Increasable engagement with customers
- Affordable marketing costs
- Brand awareness increasement
- Accurate data analysis
Disbenefits
- Limited control over platforms and accounts
- Changes in social media algorithms and trends
- Unmaintainable engagement for long period of time
- Not easy to measure the ROI (Return On Investment)
- Needs a lot of time and resource to manage each platforms
- Stakeable business reputation if anything goes wrong
Conclusion
Social media is the impactful tool to widen your business reach, attract potential clients, and grow your business. To make effective optimization, you need to learn the usage of social media marketing. You must to be aware of the current trends and most used platforms, too.Growing your business with social media has a lot of work to do. You have to research about your target audience, in order to suit your products to their needs. Apart from all that, you will gain a lot of bigger chance to grow your business in the way you want. So, It is best to go with its optimization and marketing.