14 of the Best Ways to Optimize Your Social Media Presence

Optimizing the presence of your business on social media is crucial for anyone who wants to succeed in the online world. Today, this is even more important because other brands are also trying to catch your audience's attention at the same time.

With so much noise on social media platforms, how can you stand out?

And how can you get your brand noticed by your target audience?

You need to optimize your social media marketing campaigns to get the exposure your brand deserves.

Let’s take a closer look at how to do that.

How Can You Optimize Your Social Media Presence Effectively?

Here are 14 actionable ways that can help you optimize your social media branding and get your business noticed.

1. Define Your Goals and Create a Winning Social Media Strategy

Defining your social media goal (or goals, if you have more than one) as early as possible lets you optimize your strategy from the very beginning.

If your social media branding is already underway, but you don't have any particular goals in mind, then you need to create and implement them right now.

This matters because, without a specific goal(s) in mind, your branding efforts won't be targeted and they’ll lose their effectiveness.

Some of the most common social media goals that businesses want to achieve are:

• Build awareness: Raising your brand’s awareness among new audiences is the key to attracting fresh customers and getting your brand name out there. You'll want to create content that resonates strongly with new audiences and will be shared.
• Generate new leads: The difference between awareness and lead generation is that for leads, you want your audience to take action of some kind as a response to your content. This may include signing up for your newsletter or joining your Facebook group.

If your goal is to generate new leads, you should ensure that your posts have clear calls-to-action (CTAs) at the end.

• Increase loyalty: If you’re targeting new customers the same way you interact with your current ones, you're wasting valuable time and effort. That’s because you want something different from each group.

You can create and customize your own goals to suit your branding needs, but without a clear target, your campaigns won't be as effective as they could potentially be.

2. Understand Your Audience for Better Targeting

Do you know who your products/services are for?

You need to know your target audience inside and out, like the back of your hand. Understanding them allows you to tailor your social media activities specifically to them, instead of casting a wide net.

Otherwise, you run the risk of your intended audience ignoring your social media branding efforts.

Take it a step further, and once you've defined your audience, divide them into groups, ensuring that each segment receives personally tailored content and promotions that are relevant to them.

3. Represent Your Brand and Connect with Your Audience by Adding Your Logo

Your logo is your brand's calling card. It’s your face and your signature. So, make sure your logo is high-quality and represents your brand to improve your campaigns.

Including a logo on your social media pages increases brand recognition and helps connect your brand to other messages you send online – whether on your website, blog posts, or your products – in the minds of your audience.

If you don’t have a logo yet, there are lots of options for you to make one, you could hire a freelance designer, use a dedicated logo design company (although you’ll need a big budget to get this done), or if you need one fast, you could use an online logo design creator, which takes all the hassle out of logo design by doing the hard work for you.

4. Use a Social Media Management Tool to Work Smarter, Not Harder

How do you juggle multiple accounts, manage post scheduling, and track how your posts are performing?

If you're doing it by yourself, then you're wasting precious time.

Platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to claim back your valuable time by simplifying your complete social media management process via their platform.

You can automatically schedule your posts beforehand for all of your accounts, store and curate your content in the cloud, and track and measure results.

5. Use a Design Tool to Remain Consistent

It's critical for your posts to have a consistent look and feel. Otherwise, how will your audience recognize your brand every time?

Because your design is so closely linked to your brand identity, you don't want to change it with each post. Otherwise, your brand identity will become confusing and unclear.

One way is to create a style guide for everyone to follow. This will help you keep everyone on the same page when it comes to designing images for posts. Include all the different colors, styles, and images that they can use for branded content.

Another method is to use a graphic design tool. These tools allow you to create customized design templates, specifically for social media posts. So, you can retain the look and feel of your social media posts.

This is going to be critical when your business grows and you start to hire more people. It doesn’t matter if you start working with freelancers or in-house employees, using your own templates will be crucial to keep your designs consistent.

6. Use Data to Know When to Post and When Not to

Dive deep into the results of your posts and identify when the best time and day to post is to generate maximum engagement. The results may surprise you.

Each social media platform comes with its own analytics so that you can see which days and times are the best for your audience. Note that you may find different results for each platform; weekends may be great for Instagram while mid-week could be ideal for Facebook.

If you keep posting on Monday mornings with little to no results, try posting on Monday evenings and then on Tuesday mornings. Keep trying different combinations until you've nailed when your audience is most receptive to your posts.

7. Post Consistently: Same Time, Same Day

This one closely ties into number 6, but it deserves its own spot on the page. Keep your posting schedule consistent and don't miss any scheduled posts.

In order to build a consistent following, you’ll need your audience to rely on you for new, engaging content – which they will over time if you keep your posting schedule consistent.

It may be hard to remember to be in front of the computer every single time you’re ready to post, so you can always use the Facebook post scheduler and other tools to plan your posts for the week.

And, if you do find yourself missing a deadline, let your audience know! They'll love that you're engaging with them in an authentic way, even if it's to let them know why you missed your weekly post.

8. Nail Your Tone of Voice and Don’t Change It

Your brand needs a unique tone of voice.

Is it funny, witty, sarcastic, serious, or charming?

And, remember to choose a tone that your audience responds well to.

This means you may need to use different marketing personas on various networks. Your Facebook personas may be much more informal than your LinkedIn personas, which will be more serious. Whereas on your Twitter feed, you can go all out with the tongue-in-cheek comments.

Each audience needs its unique brand persona that speaks directly to them, and in such a way that they respond well to it based on the social network they're using.

9. Don't Forget to Respond to Your Users. They Love Being Engaged

It’s easy to forget when managing multiple social media accounts that it's a two-way conversation. Your audience will respond to you by liking, upvoting, retweeting, or commenting on your posts.

So, don't forget to write back!

Why is it so important?

You'll create a lot more engagement when you actively participate in conversations happening on your posts. This is true, especially, if you're greeting new members who join your Facebook group, or doing your best to make sure that no comment is left unanswered.

You can also take the opportunity to respond to negative feedback. This will show your audience that you care about them regardless of whether they’re singing your praises or airing a complaint.

10. Target the Right Keywords for the Best Results

Give your social media branding a boost by optimizing the keywords you use for each specific social network. If you want to beat your competitors, you'll need to target ultra-specific keywords in your niche to help boost your engagement and exposure.

Tools like BuzzSumo are built explicitly for social media platforms and allow you to search for trending topics and keywords so that you can create a list of content ideas.

Or, you can use hashtag monitors like Hashtagify to explore and monitor popular hashtags on a specific platform (in this case, Twitter).

You can break down keywords into two different types:

• High-volume keywords are keywords with a really high number of people searching for it every month. Targeting these keywords will help your brand grow by putting your brand in front of as many people as possible.
• High-intent keywords are keywords where the searcher is looking to perform an action of some kind, such as seeking to learn about something or buy a product.

The trick is making sure that your social media content matches the intent of your user. Otherwise, they won’t connect with your campaign or perform the action you want them to.

11. Analyze Your Competitors’ Social Activities if You Want to Beat Them

Don't be afraid to snoop on your biggest competitors. You can bet they're doing the same to you.

Identify who your biggest competition is, then start to gather data such as their engagement rates and how often they post.

Why is this important?

If you can identify which topics received the most engagement, their branding style, and some vital information about their audience, you'll be able to use that information to optimize your own social media branding efforts.

12. Invest in the Right Tools. Sometimes You Need to Spend Money to Make Money

Don't be afraid to invest in tools that can help you work smarter, quicker, and more efficiently.

A bad workman blames his tools, but why dig a trench by hand when you can hire a digging machine to do it for you?

You can try to identify essential keywords yourself, but you'll be hard-pressed to beat some of the paid tools. The same applies to automatic posting and content management.

Dedicate more time to the tasks that matter and let your tools handle the heavy lifting for you. This doesn’t mean you should go out and buy the first software program you come across.

How should you invest in social media marketing tools?

First, research to make sure that a specific platform meets your needs, and most importantly, fits your budget. Decide how much you’re willing to spend per month on the features that will help your brand grow, and only then get ready to purchase or subscribe to one.

And don’t be shy about asking for a free trial if they don’t offer one automatically. It’s the best way to make sure that the product will fit your needs without costing you a cent.

13. Open Yourself to Feedback and Use it to Improve Your Social Media Campaigns

Are you open to receiving constructive criticism?

If you have coworkers, ask what they think of your upcoming posts and content. It's hard to remain objective when you've worked hard to create something. But, with a fresh pair of eyes comes a new perspective.

You can also ask your audience for their honest opinions, either publicly or privately. It's the best way to hear genuine feedback about your social media campaigns without relying on reports.

14. Reuse Old Posts. Don’t Just Leave Them Collecting Dust

You can always repurpose old content to allow your audience to engage with your previously popular posts.

But wouldn’t that look repetitive?

Your audience is always growing (at least, hopefully!) and your new followers aren’t likely scrolling back far enough to see which blog post you featured when.

Plus, repurposing content helps you look more active without the need to create new posts and generate new ideas continuously.

For more visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, you can always feature the same post as you have in the past and just create a new image to go along with it, keeping to your brand’s style guide so it looks good in your feed.

Check your data reports to see which of your old posts were the most popular (you can evaluate by likes, shares, and comments). You can even create a collection of popular past posts or posts that are in the same category.

Ready to Optimize Your Social Media Presence?

Every single one of you is at a different stage of your social media branding. But it doesn't matter if you're at the beginning stages with zero posts or if you've been running campaigns for years across multiple networks.

To get the best results and the most out of your hard efforts, you need to optimize as you go along or you'll end up floundering, shouting at the top of your voice, but no one will be listening.

How can you grab your audience’s attention?

You should use these 14 tips to start optimizing your social media campaigns today. You’ll be able to get more exposure for your social media content and grow your brand’s presence.

What social media marketing strategies do you use? Please share them with us in the comments below.