HIGHLY EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION TIPS:

GENERAL:

 Have your branding down – your brand story, your mission, your logo, colors, fonts, style
 Know your audience and their pain points – “place yourself in your audience’s shoes”
 Have one main goal that you want to achieve with social media in the next 3-6 months
 Make sure your social profiles are fully filled out and up to date.
 Cross promote your social profiles. (example: connect Facebook, Twitter, Instagram profiles to
YouTube)
 Commit to STOP buying followers and fans (period!). It’s not worth the risk anymore. Work to
create content that’s unique, valuable and worth sharing – the rest will come naturally.
 Every few weeks or so, check your email contacts for new people to connect with on social
media and reach out.
 Schedule posts and manage your social media accounts with less time. There are lots of great
tools that can help you manage your social profiles (like Buffer, HootSuite, SproutSocial or Agora
Pulse).
 Analyze ALL analytic data on a regular basis – weekly is ideal.
 Use Google Analytics. Begin by setting up goals inside Google Analytics. Next use the social
reporting features in Google Analytics to check the results you get from your social media
marketing campaigns. That way you can measure how much traffic your social campaigns are
bringing to your website and how much of that traffic results in conversions.
 Utilize Influencer Marketing – but beware of the FAKES.
 Continue improving the quality of your own domain.
 Use customizable chatbots especially for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
 Experiment with paid advertising for social media to 10x all your efforts.

SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CREATION TIPS:

 Post content on a CONSISTENT basis (this factor alone can make or break your efforts)
 Use PicMonkey, BeFunky, or Canva to quickly design attractive social posts
 Need new content ideas? or Want to get a heads up on the competition? Feedly or
BuzzSumo are two of the best tools we’ve found for discovering new, fresh, or popular content
on the web.
 Work to build trust, familiarity, and likeability by appealing to emotion
 Use high quality images – use original, unique images as much as possible
 Optimize your image ALT tags using your main keyword phrases
 Insert a watermark or logo on your original images, videos and ebooks
 Create more video content & share to multiple networks
 Market your social proof (i.e. customer reviews) as much as possible.
 If you blog a lot – I highly recommend using the premium version of S.N.A.P. (Social Network
Auto Poster) Plugin – It’s $49-99 per year and worth every penny because it can automatically
publish your blog post to up to 30 of the top social networks!
 Avoid “engagement bait” especially on Facebook. (engagement bait is content that explicitly
asks for likes, shares, votes, ect.)
  Make content so valuable people can’t help but share it. Infographics work quite well.

NETWORK-SPECIFIC SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION TIPS

FACEBOOK:

 Use the official Facebook buttons with Facebook’s Page Plugin. Using this will help people
connect with you on social media with only one click without having to leave your website.
 Take advantage of custom tabs on your Facebook page. Basically custom tabs allow you to
create a landing page right inside your Facebook profile so people can opt-in to your offers
without leaving the social network. The best part is, there are a bunch of great tools that help
you do this without needing to know how to code. A few reliable providers
include: TabSite, Pagemodo, and ShortStack to name a few. These companies offer both free
and paid plans to help you build landing-page like offers from platforms (like your website, blog,
or other social networks) baked into your Facebook page, allowing you to create landing pages,
welcome pages, exclusive offers, coupons, and even sell your products. A great option for any
business looking to use Facebook for lead generation.
 Use more than just Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights can help you see basic analytics which
can be helpful. However, there are a number of other tools out there that can provide more
detailed metrics so you can see deeper into what’s really working on your audience. Some
reliable providers are: PageLever, Webtrends, AllFacebook Stats, and Simply Measured just to
name a few.
 Get alerts when your favorite FB pages have updates. This can be especially helpful if you make
mentions or curate content from other pages or brands. Hyper Alerts is a free tool you can use
to get email alerts when there is new activity on your favorite Facebook pages.
 Experiment with Facebook Advertising. Facebook advertising has changed a lot in the past year.
There are lots of different options (11 types to be exact!) If you are looking to dive into
Facebook advertising, I recommend experimenting with different types of advertising. Also just
as a tip when it comes to Facebook ads – there’s 3 important things to keep in mind - #1 – get as
specific as possible when narrowing down your audience to advertise to. #2 – use ad
campaigns to help build likes and engagement to your posts and pages to help increase social
proof, this will help your ads perform better when you re-promote them later. #3 – Don’t send
cold Facebook traffic directly to a sales page. This can work well sometimes, but 99% traffic
coming from Facebook needs to be warmed up with a blog post, long form sales page or video
that will educate them with more information before sending them off to a sales page to buy.

TWITTER:

 Make sure your profile is updated to the new look – and is still able to be read clearly.
 Research popular hashtags & Use Twitter tools to learn more about your audience.
 Use Twitter management tools like TweetDeck or Social Pilot to speed up your processes
 Use Twitter cards for higher follower engagement.
 Land clients by tweeting with them. Twitter is one of the easiest networks for engaging with
people, regardless of whether they are following you. Share their posts and include their
username in the tweet. Reach out to them personally and begin a dialog.
  Keep track of your follower trends. Want to know what you’re doing right or wrong with your
Twitter account? Use Followerwonk or Twittercounter is a free tool that lets you see your
follower growth over a three month time span. Take a peek at it every so often to see if there
are any major surges in your follower count, and match it up with updates or other promotions
you had around the same time.
 Promote your account and tweets with Twitter advertising. If you’ve been on Twitter for a
while and want to maximize your efforts, try out Twitter advertising. You may have heard that
Twitter advertising is expensive, and that can be true if you’re looking at doing Promoted
Trends. Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets on the other hand are fairly affordable and
very easy to set up.

GOOGLE+

 If you’re a local business, encourage reviews on your Google+ local page. Since working in
Reputation Marketing, I can tell you reviews can make or break your business. Working hard to
give your customers a 5-star experience and asking for a review will go a long way in making
your business look good, perform well in local search results and help bring in more customers.
 Share updates publicly. And share the most important ones to specific circles. Now keep in
mind, that you don’t want to do this all of the time as you’ll drive people crazy. Just do it for
those really important updates that you don’t want people to miss.
 Take advantage of Rich Snippets. Google+ Authorship markup is no longer supported and Rich
Snippets have taken it’s place. The best part is, Rich Snippets is much more flexible than
Authorship. It can be used for blog posts, authors, products, videos, recipes and more. It simply
places reviews or images beside your content, which makes it stand out much more in the
search results.
 Use the official Google+ badge on your website. The Google+ badge makes it easy for visitors to
your website to follow your page or your personal profile without them having to leave your
website. Be sure to implement it!
 Add the +1 button to your website and your content. Even if you don’t believe +1′s help with
search, it may help with social sharing as people get the option to share anything they +1 with
their followers. So be sure to add the +1 button to your main home page and on your content to
make it easily shareable on Google+.

LINKEDIN

 Take advantage of the new company page design. Use product and service pages, clickable
banners and page insights. Page insights give you more information about the people who visit
your company pages, including their job title, industry, region, company size, and more.
 Post updates to your company page.
 Encourage people to endorse you based on your skills. Add skills to your LinkedIn personal
profile, and then encourage others to endorse you by asking for endorsements and sharing your
updated LinkedIn profile on other networks.
 Add work experience and additional details to your LinkedIn profile. Have you published a
book? Have you received professional certifications or awards? Is your volunteering experience
something you’d like to share? If so, go to Edit Profile and look for the Add option above your
Summary. There you will find more specific sections you can add to your profile. Publications
 great as you can directly link them to Amazon or your website. You can always link to free
ebooks that include links to landing pages for where they can sign up.
 Try out LinkedIn advertising. LinkedIn advertising is a bit more expensive compared to other
social network advertising. However, it also offers targeting options that no one else does. If you
work with other businesses or professionals and are looking for clients in a specific industry, you
can target the ads specifically toward people in that industry. By creating a custom landing
page for people in those industries, it could increase your ad conversions. Proper audience
targeting and segmenting will be your best friend when it comes to social advertising.

PINTEREST

 Thank those who pin images from your website. Use the
URL http://pinterest.com/source/domain.com/ — and replace domain.com with your website
domain.
 Make sure no one is using your images without giving you a link back. If you have original
images on your website, you can use Google’s reverse image search using the URL to your image
or by uploading the image itself. Then look through search results to see if you find results from
Pinterest. If so, you can reach out to these pinners and kindly ask them to insert your website
url. Or you can ask them to remove it – but since they’re already using your image – why not get
more traffic from it by having them replace the url. Although somewhat time consuming, this
can be a good way, in general, to make sure you’re getting all the traffic you deserve.
 Schedule your pins. Tailwind, is a great solution for this problem. Tailwind is the only software
that’s been officially endorsed by Pinterest and Instagram. You can upload pins in bulk, schedule
them, and see analytics for the pins you’ve shared. You can also see the most influential pinners
and learn more about their interests.
 Use the Pin It button or Rich Pins (I recommend Rich Pins) to share images on your website.
 Play around with promoted Pins. Just like every other social network on this list, you can boost
your efforts on Pinterest with paid advertising. The good news is, Pinterest is one of the most
affordable platforms to advertise on. So if you are in an industry that can be sold visually – check
out Pinterest ads, it may be just the thing you were looking for.
 Get Local with your Pinterest page. If you have a local business, or multiple physical locations,
be sure to emphasize them on your Pinterest page by having boards dedicated to specific
locations.

INSTAGRAM

 Use Hashtags Effectively. You can add up to 30 hashtags per post. I recommend
researching the most relevant & popular hashtags using: RiteTag or HashTagify (these can
also be used for Twitter). Because now Instagram users are able to follow specific hashtags,
meaning that they can keep tabs on relevant conversations by using hashtags alone.
 Integration of Direct Messages. Links can now be used in Instagram Direct Messages.

A word of warning: direct messaging is still seen by many as a channel for personal
connection, brands are not always welcome in people’s personal messaging. So do be
 respectful when reaching out to people and try to only reach out to those who have
already expressed an interest in your industry.

 Use Instagram Stories. Stories allow you to showcase specific Stories like from events,
related to products, highlighting customers, etc. There’s a range of way s in which the tool
can be used. For example you can also pay to have Stories last longer than 24 hours.

Instagram also added the ability to cross-post Instagram Stories to Facebook (not rolled out
to all users as yet) - which, by extension, now also means you’ll be posting to Messenger
Day since Facebook Stories and Messenger Day have now been merged.

 Stay Mindful of Visual Composition. While Instagram has changed a lot in the past 12
months, it’s still a visual channel, so it’s still important to consider image composition and
visual consistency when posting. You also want to ensure you stay consistent with the
colors you use, the filters, text overlays, fonts, ect. Focusing on creative, high quality
images, and consistently great composition, will help boost your Instagram performance
more than anything else.
 Use Instagram Live. This one may not be for everyone, but Instagram’s live-streaming
feature can be a great way to boost your trust, familiarity and authority. Conduct
interviews, Q and A sessions, behind-the-scenes tours, etc.

YOUTUBE

 Make slightly longer videos

Watch time is the #1 ranking factor for YouTube. So longer videos tend to rank higher. So
to give yourself the best shot at getting your videos to rank high – make your videos
slightly longer. Usually 15-30 mins is the sweet spot for watch time but feel free to
experiment with this and see what works best for your channel.

 Use tools to make optimization easy

Tools like Vidiq and Tubebuddy are the best tools for YouTube to help you optimize your videos
and choose the best keywords, tags and more. They also make it a breeze to spy on the
competition.

Tags and descriptions don’t carry near the weight they used to but they do still help.

Here’s how I use video tags:

First tag is the exact target keyword – this is usually the keyword in the title.

I also include a few variations of that word or phrase. Finally, I make a few of my tags other
topics that the video covers.

Create longer descriptions, usually 500-2,000 words long. Include your keyword in the first 25
words, Include your keyword 3-4 times through the description

 Ask viewers to subscribe & share

 Although this seems like common-sense you still need to remember to do it. Because the
number of people that subscribe after watching your videos is actually a pr etty powerful
ranking factor for YouTube. So be sure to end every video asking your viewers to like,
subscribe and share!

 Create a video series

Keep in mind, watch time is the number 1 ranking factor so that means we need to do
everything in our power to keep viewers engaged. Ideally, we want them to sit through &
watch every video all the way till the end. By creating a series of videos covering a certain
topic viewers will be a lot more likely to go through and watch additional videos – (thus
boosting our viewer watch times) as long as you are effectively utilizing video cards linking
the videos together.

Which brings me to my final tip…

 Utilize video cards & playlists

Since our main goal on YouTube is to increase watch time and keep people engaged with
our videos, that means we need to make sure we successfully interlink our videos
appropriately. Viewers are MUCH more likely to watch multiple videos if you:

#1 – inserted video cards linking to the next video.

#2 – made mention of the next video inside the video itself.
#3 the video is contained in a series of related videos.

If you do all three of those tips, you’ll be well on your way towards higher watch times.

Want even more great social media tips? Check out my other Udemy courses!

Social Media Marketing: Quick Guide of Basic Principles (Perfect for beginners)

Keyword Research: Social Media Keyword Research Tools

YouTube Marketing & Video SEO Growth Hacking Masterclass

Social Media: Optimization Tips Quick Guide (for even more optimization tips!)