Social media is an integral part of marketing and SEO that can no longer be overlooked. It’s suicidal for brands not to have a social media presence.

Yes, you can be on social media and still not make use of it to the full potential, Major corporations have always had their presence felt in the social media world, mainly because they could afford to hire extra employees to manage it all or they paid a large agency a lot of money to run their social accounts. When you have huge funds available anything is possible and you can get exposure from every angle.

The average small business would engage in social media only when they had time. A few updated posts here and there, sometimes it might seem like a big load to carry in maintaining the social media profiles knowing fully well they aren’t on the same platform… Well, to be frank, it is a huge load but why occupy the digital space and not make the best out of it, no matter what your reason for being on social media you have to develop a focused plan with the goal of engagement.

Social media can’t be an afterthought anymore. You need to be active on several social networks and constantly provide new content and interact with your followers. To me, there are six main social networks that businesses need to focus on:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Google+
  • YouTube
  • Instagram

 How To Optimize Your Social Media for Your Business

I’ve pointed 10 ways to pull massive attention to your social media profiles hereby optimizing them

Use the correct image sizes

It baffles me how many social profiles have images that are all blurry and look horrible because the business isn’t using the right image sizes. Nothing looks more unprofessional than pictures that are distorted or pixelated.

There are so many different image dimensions, remembering them all can be difficult, but it still isn’t a good reason not to use the right tools. Before I got accustomed to the Adobe Photoshop software, I used a couple of online photo editors (Google it) to make all of my social media images, including profile covers as well as images to use in posts. You just select what you want to make and use this tool to customize it to your liking.

If you want to make sure you always have the exact dimensions for all of the popular social media images, I made this cheat sheet for you. Take the time to use properly sized images, as it will make your profiles look more professional.

Facebook:

Cover photo: 851 x 315
Profile picture: 160 x 160 (upload as 180 x 180)
App icons: 111 x 74
Timeline: 504 x height is up to you (shared image), 484 x 252 (shared link)
News feed: 470 x 394 (shared image), 470 x 246 (shared link)

Twitter:

Header image: 1252 x 626, 1500 x 500 (redesign)
Profile picture: 250 x 250
Image in feed: 1024 x 512

LinkedIn:

Banner image: 624 x 220
Logo: 100 x 60
Link Thumbnail: 100 x 100

Google+:

Cover photo: 1010 x 608 (recommended), 480 x 270 (minimum), 2120 x 1192 (maximum)
Profile picture: 250 x 250
Image post: 4:3 aspect ratio (800 x 600 minimum)

YouTube:

Banner image: 2560 x 1440 (TV), 2560 x 423 (desktop), 1546 x 423 (mobile)

Instagram:

Image: 640 x 640

Create a smart posting schedule

Ok, so what is a smart posting schedule? It’s finding the right formula of posting enough without posting too much. You want to make sure you put your message in front of a large percentage of your followers, while not smothering the very engaged ones, and pushing them away.

Not all of your followers are active at the same time. You will never get good engagement if you are just posting content once. You need to post it 3 to 4 times to increase the chances of a large percent of your followers seeing it.

Just because your business is open from 9 to 5 that doesn’t mean you should stop social media posting. Your social media should run 24/7, posting every couple of hours. This ensures that there are always new posts to attract engagement without being overbearing. We have all seen the accounts that post every 10 minutes.

What do most people do? They unfollow them!

Use a social media posting tool to make your life easier. While there are paid ones but I use Hootsuite’s free version. It does the trick and you can’t beat free.

 

Always Tell Your Social Media Followers And Fans To Share

In some of the concluding stages of a proper digital marketing campaign which are the brand promotion & advocacy stages, in this stage, your customers have already built trust with your brand that he/she promotes and as well advocates for your brand even on social media without you knowing about it, well this can happen on social media when you encourage them to do so.

Almost every single follower and fan that is following your social media profiles are two things. They are a potential first-time customer or repeat customers, and they are potential promoters.

Think about it for a minute. These people like your business so much that they want to be connected on social media and they want to receive information and updates from your business. It’s safe to assume that they like whatever it is that you are selling.

People that like your business is your best promoters. When you post a promotion or something designed to draw attraction to your business, ask your social followers to share it with their connections as well.

Even if just a few people share every post, you are expanding your reach for free. Over time, as your social media followers grow, the number of people that see your business via your social promoters, increases.

On one of my food brands on Twitter, I added to its RSS feeds a tweet suffix which states “You like? Please Retweet” and it has improved the engagements of the posts and some happen to go viral.

Interlink All Of Your Social Media Profiles

This is another point that doesn’t need much explaining, but unfortunately, it does. Not only should you cross-promote your different social media profiles, encouraging your followers to connect on every network, but you should make it easy for them to discover your other profiles by including links to them all in your profile.

Take a look at some big brands doing social media the right way. They link to their Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram social profiles, in addition to their app and brand websites.

You want to make sure your visitors can connect to you on as many social networks as possible. It’s common sense. The more social connections you have established with someone, the higher the probability is that they will engage with your business on social media.

Always Try To Complete Your Profiles 100%

Always make use of every opportunity to complete your social media profiles. If they allow you to upload 10 images, then don’t just upload a few. Take full advantage of every opportunity to tell your followers as much about your business as possible.

The “About” sections and bio sections are such a good opportunity to tell your followers what it is that your business does, but so many profiles skip this.

They put a link in their profile assuming everyone will just click over to their website, but one of the main purposes of being on social media is to be able to attract new customers who don’t mind readers, Maybe in the past it works, but people are so comfortable with social media these days that they will often make purchase decisions on social media without even visiting your site.

Maintain A Uniform Look And Feel Across All Of Your Social Media Profiles

This is something that is taught in Digital Marketing 101, all your social media profiles should have the same color theme but yet so many businesses fail to do so.

Most businesses are going to be managing several social media profiles. They all must maintain a very similar look and feel. Use customization options, like Twitter offers, to make your profile feature your logo colors. Also, make sure all of your header image and profile images are similar. You will need to alter them all, according to the image sizes that are outlined in tip number one above, but you can still make them all very similar.

What do the largest companies in the world all have in common? They are all easily recognizable. You can pick them out based just on the packaging or a logo. You need to think like a big company, even if you are a small mom, vegan influencer, and pop business. A consistent business image on all of your social media profiles is a great place to start.

Make Sure You Have A Username That Gives You Custom URLs

This is good for branding as well as for SEO and discoverability in the Google search results. When you create a business page on Facebook it will give you a random URL that doesn’t look good or identify your business in any way. To me, I think it’s strange that they even do it this way, but you need to request a URL change to have a custom page link. How do you do that? Create a username and it would be assigned to your URL

If your business name is Joe’s Car Wash, what looks better if you put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer:

Default/Strange URL – Facebook.com/page/87345354375634875634

Or?

Custom URL – Facebook.com/joecarwash

The custom URL looks better to the naked eye, but it also will help potential customers find you in Google search results. If you are a business, you want as many of your social media pages ranking under your main website in the search results. Social pages have high authority, so occupying page one of Google with these is great for reputation management.

Get Familiar With Data Analytics

This is will greatly impact your pockets. Being active on a lot of social media networks isn’t something one does with a low budget. Either you pay someone or you have to do it yourself, which costs your time. You have to generate content to share, etc. You know the drill.

So, why not make sure that all that stress & hard work is paying off, by making a profit? Find out where your most profitable traffic is coming from. Not just visitor numbers, because 10,000 visitors from Facebook is useless if it didn’t make you any money. 500 visits from a social network that made you a lot of money are more impressive.

Use the data in your analytics to see what social media sources are making you money and what ones are sending traffic that doesn’t convert. Scale up the ones that are working and either make changes or slow down the ones that aren’t making money.

You want to keep profiles on all networks, just to help you fill page one, but don’t be active daily unless they are making you money. One of the digital marketing techniques I’ve learned is to be able to build your ideal customer profile (I’ll explain that in my forthcoming articles), with such information you know what to expect and look for your customers, with your social media analytics (insights) you can track them and if you’re into Facebook/Instagram ads you can retarget them to get the best profit.

I see it as “Putting your money where your mouth is”

Well, that’s all for now. You can also learn about the best ways to drive traffic to your business website as this helps you maximize your presence on the internet to build your purse.

If there are more ways that I didn’t list out in this article then you can drop them in the comment box below, and I also would love to hear how you have used social media to help your business online. Leave a comment, share it with your friends…

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