Social media is more and more becoming the objective tool for digital marketing. This is not to say that other forms of digital marketing such as email, SEO, and Pay per click are on the decline. It’s just that never before have so many people be so easy to reach, and that reach really is the topic of today. How do we manage to reach thousands upon thousands of people through social media without knowing who they are. The passive answer is that we rely on people’s internet browsing patterns to inform algorithms to show them ads and products or services that may be of interest to them. But no ones browsing patterns are the same and we can’t just take a back seat and depend on the forces at work to reach people for us. We must become that force and perpetuate our own reach to some degree. The best way to increase reach on social is to treat it like a Google search: through optimization. Timelines, news feeds, streams, etc. are so commonly influenced by algorithms now that SMO should be a focus on every network.
You want to make sure to engage the people already seeing your posts, so they’ll spread to other users. You can do this by:
- Focus on the right networks – no use in spending a few hours a week on a platform your target audience doesn’t have accounts on
- Optimize your profile – profiles themselves should be optimized for discovery
- Stay evergreen – since posts aren’t always shown as soon as they’re posted anymore, create evergreen social content
- Post smarter, not more – focus on engagement and quality instead of posting a thousand times per day
- Use targeting – some networks let you target your posts to specific segments of your audience, which you can take advantage of to write more relevant and personalized content
- Post during slow hours – buck the trends and post when the number of users online is lower, when no other brands want to post
- Mix it up – when it comes to post types and formats, post a variety of each
- Promote your social presence – cross-promote your social media profiles and content on your website, collateral, and other online channels
- Balance promotional and useful – always think of the user before your own goals, and balance talking about your business with other topics
- Interact – engage your followers by starting conversations and replying to anyone who talks about you