Social media is now a part of marketing and SEO that can no longer be ignored. Major corporations have always had a social presence, 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 unlimited money anything is possible and you can get exposure from every angle.
The average small business would dabble in social media when they had time. A few updated posts here and there, but not 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. In my mind, there are seven main social networks that businesses need to focus on:
- Google+
- YouTube
I’ve put together a list of 10 tips to help you optimize your social media profiles and attract worthwhile engagement.
1. Use the correct image sizes
It amazes 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. There are so many different image dimensions, remembering them all can be difficult, but it still isn’t a good excuse. I like to use a free tool called Canva 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)
Pinterest:
Board cover: 217 x 147
Preview image: 51 x 51
YouTube:
Banner image: 2560 x 1440 (TV), 2560 x 423 (desktop), 1546 x 423 (mobile)
Instagram:
Image: 640 x 640
2. Establish 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 ones that are very engaged, 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. I use Hootsuite’s free version. It does the trick and you can’t beat free.
3. Don’t go overboard on the automation
I mentioned using a posting too like Hootsuite above, but I don’t want you to get that confused with one of the many spammy automation tools out there. Have you ever seen the same accounts follow your accounts week after week or favorite every single tweet you post with a certain hashtag? It reeks of spam, so don’t do it. I would suggest using tools that help make your posting and scheduling easy, but not ones that are going to upset your followers.
A lot of people think that mass following, retweeting, sharing, favoriting, and comments are going to attract a lot of new followers. If anything, it pushed quality followers away and attracts a bunch of spammy ones. The number of followers doesn’t matter. It’s the number of engaged followers that matters. I’ll take a Twitter profile with 1,200 engaged followers over a profile with 100,000 followers and little to no engagement any day.
4. Encourage your social media followers and fans to share
Every single follower and fan that is following your social media profiles is two things. They are a potential first time customer or repeat customer, and they are a potential promoter. 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 a safe bet that they like whatever it is that you are selling.
People that like your business are 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.
Here is a random tweet I came across. The user simply asked for a retweet and guess what happened? They received 41 retweets.
5. Interlink all of your social media profiles
This is another tip that shouldn’t need 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 GUCCI’s Facebook page below. They link to their Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram social profiles, in addition to their app and additional GUCCI 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.
6. Make sure you complete your profiles 100%
Take advantage 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 this isn’t the case at all. Maybe in the past, 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.
Take a look at T-Mobile’s Twitter bio and Facebook “About” section:
You will see they take full advantage of the space. Their Twitter bio also lists their Twitter profile dedicated for support, as social media is now the number one place customers go when they want to get in touch with a company. Their Facebook “About” details are also complete, taking advantage of every available character of real estate.
7. Maintain a uniform look and feel across all of your social media profiles
This is something that is taught in Marketing 101, yet so many businesses fail. Most businesses are going to be managing several social media profiles. It’s important that they all 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 packaging or a logo. You need to think like a big company, even if you are a small mom and pop business. A consistent business image on all of your social media profiles is a great place to start.
8. Take advantage of vanity custom URLs
This is something that is good for branding as well as for SEO and discoverability in the 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. 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.
If your business is High Performance Motoring, what looks better if you put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer:
Facebook.com/page/87345354375634875634
Or…
Facebook.com/HighPerformanceMotoring
The vanity URL looks better to the naked eye, but it also will help potential customers find you in the SERPs. 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 defense planning.
9. Don’t forget about SEO (fill page one)
Google any major company you can think of. Here are the results after searching for “budweiser” in Google. We will just pay attention to the results above the fold:
As you can see, the news results always show up on top now, but look right below that. The company’s Twitter profile is above their own website. Now that Google is showing tweets in real time it makes having an active Twitter profile a huge advantage in the SERPs. If you scroll down you will see the company’s other social media profiles are also showing on page one.
This is a major corporation that receives worldwide press very frequently, so these aren’t the same results that a small mom and pop business would experience. A small business isn’t going to have all the news items, leaving plenty of room to fill the first page with high authority social profiles.
10. Analyze your data and analytics
This is a tip that will greatly impact your wallet. Being active on a lot of social media networks isn’t cheap. You have to pay someone or you have to do it yourself, which costs your time. You have to create content to share, etc. You know the drill.
So, why not make sure that all your hard work is paying of, in the form of profit? Find out where you 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 is 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 makes 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.
I want to hear how you have used social media to help your business online. Leave a comment and let me know. Until next time…
