The never-ending wave of social media algorithm updates gives many marketers a hard time. 63% identified changes to SEO/search algorithms as their most important content marketing issue. Instead of adopting a hit-or-miss approach, check out these tips to optimize your social media posts and get them squarely and memorably in front of your audience.
Brands across many industries have seen a decline in organic reach since Facebook’s shift toward prioritizing conversations with family and friends. In fact, posts from top brands have suffered a 50% reduction in overall engagement. Use the following tactics to improve your reach despite the cloudy conditions in Facebookland.
Deliver engaging content: Aim to understand your customers on a granular level. Find out how they’re engaging on social media and use those insights to create informative, inspiring, and entertaining posts. As one example, outdoor brand REI produces content that relates to their customers’ lifestyles and connects with them on an emotional level. The brand’s Mirnavator video, which tells the story of a plus-sized runner, has over 6 million views and 54,000 shares (and counting).
Use Facebook Audience Optimization: This feature helps marketers reach specific audience segments and increase engagement. Just narrow down the subsets and incorporate tags that are both, directly and indirectly, related to your post in order to connect with more users. For a glimpse at how your audience receives your content, head to the ‘Insights’ tab on your Facebook page and click ‘Posts’ in the navigation bar.
Go Live: On average, live posts get six times more interactions than regular videos. Personalize your live video and increase discoverability by including location and adding an activity. To boost ranking and engagement, encourage viewers to leave comments or questions, and respond to them in real time. Add polls to your broadcast and stay live for at least 10 minutes. Finally, consider mixing Facebook Live videos with other original content to maximize organic reach.
With over 5000 tweets sent every second, standing out on Twitter can be challenging. In fact, the average engagement rate is only 0.046% per post. While you can use native content to drive engagement, the following tips can help bolster your Twitter strategy.
Include relevant hashtags: Increase your reach and discoverability by including branded or relevant trending hashtags in your tweets. Tweets with at least one hashtag earn 2x more engagement than those with none. Ensure hashtags fit organically into your tweet, stick to one or two to avoid looking spammy, and don’t use caps lock.
Have fun with emojis: Incorporate emojis into your tweets to capture attention and connect with your audience. Tweets with emojis receive 25% more engagement than tweets that don’t feature the special characters. To avoid emoji fail, use only those that relate to your message. If you’re feeling creative, take advantage of Twitter’s 280-word limit to creatively tell stories, as restaurant chain IHOP did below:
Use video: Video content thrives on Twitter. Tweets with video attracted 10x more engagements than tweets without video. Use a mixture of captions, animated text overlays, and engaging visuals to make it easy for viewers to follow with or without sound. To make your video more enticing, feature branded elements and experiment with video lengths until you find what works.
With Instagram generating over 4x more interactions than Facebook, the photo sharing app evolved from a selfie destination to a marketing platform for businesses. Because the number of engagements determines the post’s position in the feed, these three tactics will help ensure consumers see your content.
Use shoppable tags: More than 90 million users tap shopping tags on Instagram. Reduce friction in the shopping journey by placing shoppable tags in your posts and stories. Double-check that links take users directly to the item’s landing page and resist the urge to include tags in all your posts.
Include location tags: If you have a physical retail store, include location tags in your posts and stories to gain exposure for your brand and make your posts discoverable in search. Posts with a location tag see 79% more engagement than posts without. Encourage consumers to include their location in posts about your brand so you can easily engage with them.
Put your best photo forward: Compared to videos and carousels, photos on Instagram earn the most engagement. Share images with faces to humanize your brand while also posting both UGC and influencer posts. Make sure you obtain permission to share content that doesn’t belong to you and give photo credit in your posts.
YouTube
83% of marketers say video gives them good ROI, and 45% plan to add YouTube to their marketing efforts. In view of the likely upsurge on YouTube, these suggestions will help consumers discover your content.
Transcription: Include transcripts in your videos so search engines can crawl your content and rank it accordingly. Use a professional video transcription service or transcription software to include text in multiple languages, making your videos accessible to more viewers.
Keywords: Optimize your videos to rank for popular search queries by placing relevant keywords in their titles, tags, description, and thumbnail files. To find strong keywords, use the YouTube Search Suggest feature, carry out competitor research, or use keyword tools to view low-competition keywords.
Description: Target your description wordcount at 250+, place important keywords at the beginning of your description, and include no more than 15 relevant hashtags. Be sure to include timestamps to help viewers skip to important parts of your videos as well as links to playlists.
Don’t Stop Learning
Like it or not, you’re at the mercy of social media algorithms. To make sure your audience sees your posts, keep your eye on updates and continue learning how to adapt to evolving social media algorithms. Focus on creating authentic content with compelling visuals to generate engagement, invest in vertical and interactive video, and consider amplifying your best organic content with paid boosts to stay top of mind.