In the present reality when creating viral content is everything, it’s not enough to have first-time visitors coming straight from search engines and reading your content for a few minutes and leaving as abruptly as they came. You have to ensure the virality of the content and prepare a decent platform for it to encourage and distribute it. If spread naturally via grape vine, good content can build the community around your brand, articles that you write or your persona. Genuine interest of readers is the base for social media optimization. Sunshine Digital Marketing Agency has an enormous experience in optimizing social media channels for both big and small businesses from simple tasks as adding social sharing buttons to a blog to SMM schemes of a very complex nature to expand a new brand on a global scale. So if you have some questions, you can ask us. A consultation is completely free and our specialists will devote as much time as you need to understand how SEO and Social Media works. Besides Sunshine Agency offers you social media optimization services that are worth every dollar that you pay for. In this article we will try to answer the question that we often get from our clients: “why do you need social media optimization services”.
Why indeed? There are so many different services out there that are all related to social media: the development of a social medial strategy, social media promotion, and social media optimization. What is the difference? It all comes down to the stages of the social media. When you first start with social media, you need a social media strategy, then you need actual promotion services like creation of accounts on social media platforms and distribution of content. Social media optimization implies that there is something that needs to be optimized using some metrics and statistics. It seems to be more mature and qualitative than the other counterparts.
The genius of social media is that you can evaluate almost everything you need and get some pretty useful insights that can bring the social media optimization you wanted so much. It is easy to do if you are endowed with some research skills. If researching is the least favorite part of social media interaction for you, use the third-party social media optimization services. Before you plunge in, however, keep in mind that evaluation has some value if you clearly understand what to measure and why. Drawing metrics from which nothing useful can be built on means time wasted and lovingly called “analysis paralysis.”
Remember how Search Engine Optimization works? All those link-building, PPC, keywords research, HTML coding. It is very similar to what you need to do for Social Media Optimization. The difference between SEO and SMO is that the latter is more subjective. SMO is very unique for each company, because the main assessor of your performance is not a robot that decides to place you higher on the page, but real people. Although search engine formulas do include some metrics on how your visitors interact with your website, it is still very cold-minded evaluation. In social media realm you deal with people’s emotions and desires more directly. The connection is deeper, because they have real faces and stories in form of profiles, previous posts and reputation on the social network or forum. It is different from the mostly anonymous traces that the visitors on your website leave behind. Of course, Google Analytics can help to got on the track of the people that lurk on your website pages, but it is still not the same effect that you can get by analyzing social media data.
Engagement
You need to learn how your social media audience interacts with you. When your posts are more popular? Is there is some pattern? Or just random stuff? By developing A/B tests and carrying out them regularly you can learn the truth, or at least the half of the truth, because you still can not get into the head of every person. You can try these tests: Pageviews vs. Attention, Subscribers and Uniques, Traffic/day vs. Traffic/post, Retweets vs. Clicks, Reach vs. Engagement etc. Instead of craving reach, maybe engagement is healthier. Is it more useful to create a post that reaches far and wide or a post that is incredibly meaningful to a smaller community? After trying out for your own content and business model you can cater the right content at the right time and place to people who will listen and spread the piece of word.
Referral to the website and conversion
Although the overall amount of referrals from social media are much lower than from organic Google search, the Return Visit percent shows the effectiveness of your networks by bringing potential customers to the place where the magic happens and actual buying occurs which helps to assess ROI. Direct click-conversion stats might not prove the value of your efforts to grow trust and influence on social media, but Assisted Social Conversions certainly can. Rememebr that due to information overload social media dwellers have the shortest attention spans when it comes to the time they interact with your website. Different social media create different needs. Some people who are interested in your articles and other website content more than the product itself can be clearly traced by the bounce-rate metrics on the web pages. For example, we found out that Quora-referred people usually are willing to spare some time only on the non-commercial content-rich part of the website: on blogs and videos, not the commercial part, while people from professional forums devoted to some specific topic or service like WordPress come to learn about the product with a purpose of trying it. Social media optimization in this case was promoting content in non-spammy way on Quora and talking about the product itself on forums. It improved the conversion rate in several times!
Sentiment
Sentiment analysis helps to understand the tone and atmosphere of a buzz around a certain topic or brand. In social media, this is mostly needed to see if netizens adore, hate, or are ambivalent about your product or content that you spread. The majority of sentiment evaluation tools are automated these days, and if you step on the hard road of measuring such a subjective thing, you’ll need a good understanding of methodology behind the metrics—especially the margin of error—to optimize properly the social media campaigns. You can use Google Alerts, Meltwater, Tweetstats, Facebook Insights, Social Mention etc. For example, you can put some frequent negative or positive words that describe your brand and find out where all the negativity comes from. There are some patterns that you can track and turn around to your own advantage.
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