Social media is an integral part of digital marketing. It provides opportunities for organizations to communicate important messages, tell their stories, and engage their communities. Building an effective social media strategy can help increase brand awareness and community engagement and increase website traffic. 

According to the 2020 Sprout Social Index, one of the main actions people take when they follow brands on social media is to visit the brand’s website. Social media channels are often the first place audiences visit when they want to learn more about a brand. Organizations create valuable content, and social networks help further promote the content to the public and drive website traffic through social media to their website.

Social media optimization

You’ve probably heard of SEO, which is shorthand for search engine optimization, but may not be familiar with SMO—social media optimization. SMO is a technique that helps promote your organization’s brand through social channels. While SEO and SMO are not exactly the same, they share a similar goal: drive traffic to your website. Social media marketing strategy and SEO are stronger together, and one of the key elements for optimizing both is creating good quality content. 

When it comes to driving website traffic through social media, you will want to start with your strategy. Make sure you have clearly defined goals and objectives, as well as KPIs so that you will be able to measure your data. There are several things to keep in mind when planning to optimize your social media to ensure you are driving traffic to your website.

Choosing social media platforms

With so many social media platforms across the globe, you will want to consider which ones will add the most value to better support your social media strategy goals and which ones will help you reach your organization’s business goals. Start by considering your audiences on each platform. Who is your target audience and which social media platforms are they using? Social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are all used globally, but you may also want to consider other geographic-specific platforms like WeChat or Line if your audience is located primarily in Asia. Each of these platforms reach a different demographic audience and offer different features, so focusing on which ones best align with your goals will make sure you are making the most efficient use of your resources.

Improving your profile or bio

You will want to make sure you fully complete the bio section in each of your social media profiles to include a link to your website, your logo, organization name, and a short description of your organization. This may seem like a simple step, but it can often be overlooked. 

Optimizing your content

You spend a lot of time putting together valuable and engaging content for your audiences, so you want to make sure they are seeing your content by optimizing it. Be sure to include links to your content on your social media channels and test captions and images or videos before posting. Find out what your audiences respond to and engage with to make sure you are using your social media effectively. You will also want to conduct keyword research to identify topics and hashtags to use.

Knowing when to Post

Many social media management platforms include features to help you schedule your posts at the most optimal times. Sprout Social has great insights into the best times to post on each platform and Sprinkler Core allows you to go a step further by creating an automation schedule. You will also want to keep in mind how often you are posting content, considering the volume and value for each platform. 

Tracking and improving your content

Once you have planned your social media strategy and outlined clear goals and objectives, you will be able to test your content to identify how it is performing. By using UTM codes you will be able to track where your website traffic is coming from through Google Analytics and determine where and when you are getting the most engagement with specific pieces of content.

Website content optimization

Content creation requires in-depth research and understanding of a specific topic to be able to provide readers with valuable information. Optimizing website content by putting yourself into your audiences’ shoes is vital to successfully engaging with your users. Conducting keyword research, selecting appropriate keywords and keyphrases for your content,  and using SEO best practices will also help ensure that people are able to find your content using their own mental models. 

Adding the required metadata and social meta tags to ensure that the featured image shows up by default when you share your content on social media. Use headers (H1, H2, H3) to structure content, optimize meta description, and make sure that image alt tags are in place. Try out different headlines for your well-structured, audience-focused content to learn what type works better than others. The effort you put in optimizing your content helps ensure that you are producing quality content and these content can help drive traffic to your website