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Optimizing Social Media Content: Which Platforms Are the Best to Optimize and How?

July 21, 2023November 15, 2022 by Nicole Inge

There’s no denying that social media can be a powerful tool for your brand. Showing up consistently with helpful and unique content for social platforms helps you generate awareness for your brand. It also attracts leads and sales. But this can be tricky as you navigate social media algorithms to get your content noticed. That’s where optimizing social media content comes into play. By being strategic with the kind of content you’re creating, you stand a better chance of boosting visibility and engagement. If you’re concerned about catching up on social media optimization, have no fear. We’re covering all of the basics of optimizing content. You’ll learn what it means and how to optimize based on each separate platform. Let’s dive in! Optimizing Social Media Content: What Does This Mean? Since social media generates awareness for your brand through exposure to a wider audience, optimization lets you capitalize on that. You use various social platforms to spread your brand’s message and establish your online presence. You spend time analyzing and auditing your strategy, factoring in social media best practices, and what’s performing well with your audience. Meaning you develop the most effective strategy possible. But what does it mean when you’re optimizing social media content? It comes down to being strategic about the content you publish. When using social media as a brand, you don’t want to post just anything. Your content should still center the interests of your target audience. In addition to considering what your audience is into, you will also want to align your content with what performs best for each separate platform to get better results. Doing social media optimization properly can help you reap a ton of rewards. The benefits speak for themselves about the value of optimizing your content: You’ll Develop an Effective Social Media Strategy: When you know how to create strong content for each social media platform, you can effortlessly craft a strategy that will help you be more consistent with posting. You’ll always know what kind of content to share, where to share, and when. It takes all the guesswork out of managing your social media presence. Your Engagement Will Increase: When your content is optimized properly, there’s a good chance it’ll see a greater reach, therefore, increasing your visibility. This means your brand could get discovered by tons of new people. And you boost engagement (such as comments, shares, and website traffic) to attract new followers. You’ll See a Greater ROI Across Platforms: Odds are, you use social media as a tool to help you achieve some of your larger business goals. Generating sales is a common one, for instance. Another is increasing brand visibility. With successfully optimized content, you increase your chances of reaching those goals and boost your ROI. Plus, seeing those analytics is a great way to see your hard work pay off. At the end of the day, the social media accounts that end up being successful are those that understand trends, the types of people on the platform, and how to take advantage of their existing content library to optimize it across accounts. They become masters at their platforms and create content their audience can’t get enough of. As a result, they’ve built engaged, loyal followings. Which Social Media Platforms Are Best to Optimize? It’s easier than ever to find a social media platform that’s an ideal fit for your brand because there many are available. You want to ensure you invest time and energy into the platforms that showcase your strengths while putting you in front of your target audience. Otherwise, you risk your content going unnoticed or getting seen by the wrong people. Source: Gainchanger If you’re going to be creating content for several platforms, you want to make sure you enhance that content for the different goals of that platform so it stands a better chance of performing well. Once you become a master at social media best practices, this will become second nature to you. To get started, you should make sure that you have defined your business goals for social media. This means choosing strategies that align with those goals. For example, if you want to improve SEO for a B2B business, you might choose LinkedIn because over 50% of companies in the B2B arena find clients on the platform. Alternatively, if you want to increase visibility for your brand, you might go with Facebook. Their ad features make it easy to target the right segments while making sure people still see your content and posts. What are the Best Tactics for Social Media Optimization? Broadly, there are a ton of things you can do to optimize your social channels. By using some of these simple strategies, you can make a big dent in getting your business out there and noticed by the right people. But what are the best ways to optimize your social media? We’ve chosen a few general fixes and high-level improvements you can make to help your business’s pages. Never Stop Thinking About Your Audience Your audience is the most important part of your social media presence. They drive your engagement. This means their interests and pain points should always be top of mind. And the demographics for your audience could be different across your different social channels. That’s why you should regularly take the time to check out the types of followers you have in your analytics. Write Snappy Bios Your bio is one of the earliest things someone will see when they check out your profile. It sets the tone and establishes who you are. So, make sure your bio covers what you do, your industry, and nails your brand tone quickly. Having a great bio can encourage a potential client to reach out to you, so you want to ensure you make a good impression while being aware of their attention span. Consider the Time You Post Tons of hours have gone into studying the best times to post on social media … Read more

How to Write the Most Engaging Social Media Posts

January 13, 2024September 7, 2021 by Adam Oakley

Writing a social media post doesn’t seem overly complicated. Should be pretty straightforward and simple to do, right? Actually, copywriting to attract the right audience from a business standpoint is a little more methodical than you might expect compared to writing social media posts as an individual. There’s a lot more at stake for the business, including a meaningful impact on the brand’s perceived authority, its reach to potential new consumers, engagement rates, and more. Globally, as of July 2021, there are an estimated 4.48 billion social media users (almost 57% of the world’s population). Facebook still reigns supreme with an estimated 2.853 million users, followed by YouTube in second place. Here’s where it gets tricky – each social media platform has its own tips, tricks, algorithms, and best practices. Content that performs well on LinkedIn isn’t likely to see that same success on Twitter or Pinterest if posts are simply copied and pasted uniformly across every channel. Not to worry… we’re here to share the best advice for each social outlet so your content performs no matter where it’s posted. When done correctly, a marketing strategy on social media can reach a lot of people to bring in leads, raise brand awareness, and create conversion opportunities. Need some help writing content for social media? Our experienced, social-media-savvy writers are just a few clicks away with social media content packages. [bctt tweet=”Copywriting to attract the right audience from a business standpoint is a little more methodical than writing social media posts as an individual. (There’s a lot more at stake! ?) Learn how to write posts that won’t fail ?” username=”ExpWriters”] How to Write Social Media Posts That Won’t Fail The good news is, you don’t have to rely on too much trial and error to nail down the best methods for the various social media channels. Why? Because a lot of other people have already done it for you! You can (and should) still monitor your social media analytics to see which posts engage with your unique audience the most, but as far as coming up with a tried-and-true formula, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Follow these tips to rule your social media campaigns. 1. How to Write Facebook Posts That Get Liked and Shared The #1 social media platform isn’t exactly a one-and-done content formula because it handles multiple types of media, and different posting techniques can work well depending on the goal you’re hoping to accomplish. To find success on Facebook, you need to “read the room” and respond to your audience. These guidelines with help you do just that: Video is the best performing content. However, Facebook campaigns are most effective when you vary your types of posts, so mix it up with photos, infographics, text, gifs, memes, blog posts, press releases, links, et cetera. The ideal length for a post is around 40-80 characters. As a general rule, short posts on social media perform better than long ones. End with a question. People are more likely to engage when you reach out to them for their opinions or feedback. Post interesting content, even if it doesn’t pertain directly to your brand. Facebook’s audience has a limited tolerance for self-promotion, which means if you want to keep your followers engaged, it doesn’t hurt to post about more than just your business. Be sure to keep your topics related to your niche, though. Make it visual. Text is easy to scroll past, but graphics help to make people pause while they’re skimming through their newsfeed. Even if you’re publishing a post that’s strictly text, Facebook makes it easy to transform it into a visual graphic. 2. How to Write Effective Tweets on Twitter Posting on Twitter requires smart, concise word choices to convey your message within a limited space. It can take a little extra practice, but once you get the hang of it, your tweets will take off. When posting on Twitter, take this advice into account: Front-load your tweet. Most people on Twitter are skimming through a massive amount of content. Put the most important information at the beginning of your tweet to catch their attention. The ideal length for a tweet is 240+ characters. Twitter increased its character limit from 140 to 280 in 2017, and users seem to appreciate the extra room to express themselves. If you need more than 280 characters, create a thread or add a link to a blog post. Tip: Use a free tool like Bitly to shorten your url and maximize your space. Don’t go overboard with hashtags. Real estate for your tweet is limited – you can’t afford to spend it all on hashtags rather than your actual message. Limit yourself to 1-3 relevant hashtags. Tweet shareable content. Twitter’s audience loves to retweet breaking news, statistics, quotes, jokes, and gifs. Timing is important on Twitter – you don’t want to be the last one to share yesterday’s news. 3. How to Write Engaging Instagram Captions Instagram is all about visual content, but that doesn’t mean you can skate by with insufficient captions. If you want your audience to interact with your content, your words do matter. Start with a bang. Instagram allows up to 2,200 characters. However, it’s important to keep in mind that no more than 125 characters will show beneath your photo. If you want your audience to read your full post, you need to entice them to click “more.” Use emojis. Instagram + emojis = ? For real, though, emojis have proven to be incredibly effective on Instagram. Use relevant hashtags. You’re allowed up to 30 hashtags, but don’t just pick the ones that are currently trending (especially if they don’t really pertain to your media). Instead, try to vary your hashtag use. Select a few broad, popular ones but also mix in some niche-specific hashtags, plus one or two branded ones. For example, Coca-Cola created the branded hashtag #ShareACoke for an Instagram campaign. Break up long text into paragraphs. Instagram … Read more

The Top Reasons You Should Be Using Pinterest for Your Business

June 19, 2024August 17, 2015 by Josh McCoy

Social media is awesome, isn’t it? You can reach out to your clients via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ and even meet new people, bringing them in and turning them into customers. There are so many excellent social channels out there that you might start to feel a bit overwhelmed and wonder just what else, outside of the social media trinity you should use. Well, I am here to tell you about an incredible social channel that you might just be overlooking – Pinterest. That’s right! I am going to show you why you need to add this channel to your mix, as well as how you can use it successfully for your business. Pinterest For Your Business: How To Succeed In Your Pinterest Social Media Marketing Pinterest is a great resource for businesses, and can give you a wider reach and range for your audience. Here are some great reasons why you should be using it. 1. Over 70 Million People Use It, & 93% of Those People Are Buyers. That’s right. The 70 million users is a stat from Wikipedia a few years ago, so it’s safe to say this may have even doubled by now. And Shopify is saying that 2 million people pin product pins daily, while 93% of all Pinterest users actually use Pinterest to plan purchases. If this isn’t your main reason to be on Pinterest, I don’t know what is. 2. You Can Use Pinterest to Help Increase Traffic. According to Jessica Meher from Hubspot, a great reason to use Pinterest is to help increase traffic. Research on the amount of traffic Pinterest provides shows that it can actually bring in more people than Facebook or Twitter, which is great for all websites. This is definitely amazing if your site is new or you rely on your site to help drive sales and bring in new customers. 3. You Will See High Amounts of User Engagement. Pinterest is amazingly addictive for anyone who uses it, and many people love to engage on it. In the article mentioned above, Jessica Meher points out that you will see more engagement on Pinterest simply because many people are on it and addicted to it. This means that they are very likely to pin, favorite, and comment on your pins while they spend their time browsing through the channel. 4. It Will Help Strengthen Your Brand. You can use Pinterest to strengthen your brand and drive trust among your client base. According to Nicole Kohler from Shareaholic, a great way to use Pinterest to strengthen your brand is to bookmark mentions of your brand and products. This will help you keep track when someone mentions your brand, giving you the chance to interact with them. This can help promote engagement, trust, and, as I’ve mentioned, strengthen your brand. It will also help you stand out from your competitors if you are regularly seeking out and engaging with your customers. 5. You Have Easy Access to Market Research. One of the great things about Pinterest is that you get the chance to do excellent market research easily. Pinterest gives you the ability to see what your users want to see while keeping you updated on the latest trends. You can follow your clients back and easily watch what they post and see just how they use social media, helping you create and curate excellent content for them. And Here Are 9 Top Ways To Successfully Use Pinterest for Your Business Now that you know a few excellent reasons as to why you should use Pinterest for your business, let’s take a look at just how you can use it successfully. 1. Integrate Pinterest With Your Website, Twitter, and Facebook. A great way to use Pinterest is to integrate it with your website, as well as your other social channels such as Twitter and Facebook. You can set it up to where Pinterest updates your Facebook and Twitter pages when you make a new pin, helping to drive your existing social media followers to your account. To integrate it with your website, you can include “Pin It” buttons to encourage visitors to pin product images to their own Pinterest accounts. 2. Learn What Your Audience Wants to See. You need to do some basic client research to be sure that when you use Pinterest, you are sharing what your clients want to see. You can create personas, but simply following your clients and taking a look at their boards can help you figure out what they pin and like to see. When you understand your Pinterest audience more, you can then start to develop things that are interesting to them, helping bring about engagement and driving more people to your website. 3. Focus On the Quality of Your pins and Not When You Post. Trying to find the best time to post to social media is something many people look for to help bring about more clicks and views. However, according to Kevan Lee from Buffer, when it comes to Pinterest, you need to focus on the quality of your pins and not when you post. High-quality pins are more important to Pinterest users and many people are on Pinterest at varying times. When you post something that is high quality, you have a higher chance having more people pin your pins and click on the links. 4. Create Excellent Captions With Each Pin. Just like with your blogs and other social media posts, the headlines and captions on Pinterest are vital. When you go to create a pin, make sure you have an amazing caption that can capture a user’s attention, convincing them to click. Focus your attention on making something that is engaging that gives clients enough information to be curious but not too much information that keeps them from looking further at your website. 5. Make Sure You are Driving Traffic to Your Site. You might be sharing a lot of interesting pins, but when using Pinterest, you need … Read more

Express Writers Re-Launches June 2015: Our Membership Program, New Products, and Quality Updates

June 19, 2024June 13, 2015 by Adam Oakley

This June, our little ol’ team at Express Writers is becoming bigger and better than ever before. We’ve spent some serious time and resources (might add, blood and sweat to that) to update our major content products and launch some brand new things. One thing you can say about us—we are not your typical content writers. We’re a firm that’s dynamic, ever updating, and developing new things internally that are ahead of the curve. Our staff is passionate and involved, and we all love what we do! Ready to hear about all our new changes? Express Writers Re-Launch This June: What Are Our Major Changes & Updates? For about three months now, our CTO Josh McCoy has led his team of developers in creating an ultra-custom Membership system that will be accessible to our ongoing clients. As our CEO, I’ve sat down and recreated our major Content Strategy training and written tests for all our Strategists, as well as wrote and launched content standard quality tests for every single one of our writers and editors. Our team is better than ever before, and we’re staffing more people almost every week to keep up with our growth. 1. Membership Platform The long-awaited Membership platform and program is finally here! Custom designed on a platform built from scratch by our development team, the Membership system replicates our Content Shop with an online ordering platform only accessible to clients who deposit and spend a minimum of $1,000 a month. When the deposit is placed, it activates the platform and clients will be able to see and order with their ongoing membership rates on every product. Besides the discounted rate access, membership clients will have easier input forms that allow them to simply upload monthly project specs: and we’ll also dedicate a project Editor to each membership client account that comes in with a style guide. Membership Benefits: Membership platform, allowing clients to access and order all the discounted products. Dedicated Staff Editors, exclusive to Membership accounts only: we train one of our staff Editors on your style guide and requirements for long-term, specific editorial attention. This is an optional add-on, starting at $85 for 20 pages. No contracts, ever. Just deposit and spend $1,000 per month. Consistently lower rates on all our products – up to 20% off! Learn more and sign up here. 2. Content Quality Standards Update We’ve completed training and testing our entire staff of writers and editors on the proper use of high quality citations, checked with the MozBar, in all our blog content. We’ve also updated our content formatting rules to include high quality headlines and sub-headers that will better attract and engage readers. These fundamental quality updates will ensure your blog content meets and exceeds Google’s content standards. See our Content Shop Blog Prices. 3. Content Blogging Plans Update We’ve done a thorough audit of how our blog plans work, and found that a word span within 1,500 words works best for the average blog. (Longer words are always favorable for Google rankings, as long as it’s quality: we recommend buying or creating single blogs over 2,000 words a few times a month for posting on your blog.) We’ve also created an additional plan for more versatility. All blogs will include high quality citations and text formatting. Lastly, we’ve introduced add-ons for blogging that include the revamped Content Planning service (a full monthly Editorial Calendar and more); as well as optional premium designed images that we can create for every blog. View our Blog Packages in the Content Shop. 4. Content Planning Replaces Content Curation Formerly called Content Curation, our Content Planning is an entirely re-vamped product in our Content Strategy lineup, available as an add-on for all of our blog plans, single website pages content planning (research and title creation), and fundamentals package for clients with new websites or blogs. Our revamped product, Content Planning, adds a new section to the Editorial Calendar we deliver monthly, as well as overview reports, called BuzzSumo Analysis. In this analysis we conduct research on your industry influencers and what is currently trending on the web (the people who are succeeding at content in your niche) and using BuzzSumo, we’ll look at what content they are writing, how many shares it gets on what platform, and prepare a topic analysis report. Finally, our Content Strategists will identify any competitor and influencers shortcomings and notate how you can do it better with a few top suggestions and takeaways. Tools we used: BuzzSumo, SEMRush, WordTracker, Hubspot/Portent title helpers, Quora, human eye of our Content Strategist. Content Planning Offerings (view the Content Planning product in our Content Shop) Content Planning Package: This is where you’ll experience the most out of our content planning products. Our ongoing Content Planning packages are for those who have our blogging plans and are looking for total content planning, organization, and creation. We’ll analyze what content is currently trending in your niche using BuzzSumo, research keywords and topics, and create an Editorial Calendar mapped out for best monthly content. Clients also get to talk to their Content Strategist in a 30-minute monthly strategizing meeting. Content Planning Fundamentals: This is a packaged plan for those who do not have an existing content plan, blog, or web content going: or are looking to re-vamp their current content. Our Content Strategists will deliver a Content Planning Overview excel report with page or blog suggestions, full keyword analysis report, and a BuzzSumo Content Analysis. Clients can (optionally) meet with their Content Strategist for a 30-minute discussion. Content Planning For Websites: Perfect for the new (or revamping) website owner who doesn’t know what pages to plan for and add to their website. We’ll conduct keyword research, deliver a BuzzSumo Content Analysis, and create an overview report that suggests categories and specific pages to add for successful web content. Clients can (optionally) hold a 30-minute meeting with their Content Strategist to share input. 5. Social Media Improvements We’re now creating custom, branded & designed images with Canva, using our stock image subscription … Read more

The Rise of Pinterest: 5 Reasons It Should be Part of Your Social Media Mix

December 31, 2020June 5, 2015 by Josh McCoy

Are you looking for a great, new way to help leverage your social media campaign? Of course you are, that’s why you’re reading this blog! There currently exists on the web an excellent social media channel that has been around for a while now, yet is starting to become a very vital aspect of any social media campaign – Pinterest. That’s right, the channel that gives people recipes and DIY tips is the next element in an impressive social media campaign. Let’s take a look at why this channel will be important for you, the various advantages of it, and how you can use Pinterest to generate revenue. Why is Pinterest Such an Important Channel? Pinterest hasn’t always been on the social media radar as an important channel for businesses. However, it is an incredible channel that can help bring about engagement and revenue for your company. According to Suzanne Delzio at Social Media Examiner, Pinterest currently has 47 million users, and this number is expected to grow exponentially in 2016. Researchers believe this growth will happen going off of past analytics that show users doubling in 2014, and more people are signing up for the social site each day. This means that your clients are likely to be on this channel already, and if they aren’t, they soon will be. While Pinterest has been a site mainly populated by women, the social media channel has attempted to grow the demographic, and reports are showing that the amount of men signing up is growing quick. As you can see, the platform is growing by leaps and bounds in many different areas and demographics, making it an important channel. You need to make sure you are on this channel soon and well before 2016 starts. Who Uses Pinterest the Most? I briefly mentioned above that women use this site the most, but that the amount of male users is growing quickly. However, I am going to give a bit more detail into the users to help you craft an excellent campaign. According to Carly Stec at HubSpot, one-third of users are women, and that number is up by 25 percent. In addition, 8 percent of men inside the United States use the social channel, which is a growth from 5 percent. These numbers are expected to rise, and this means that there will be more shoppers will to buy your products or services. For now, women are still dominating over at Pinterest, and should be a target audience. However, don’t neglect the men who are starting to use this channel, as well. The Anatomy of a Pinterest Brain When it comes to Pinterest, you need to know and understand the anatomy of a user’s brain. Just why do they go to the platform and how do they become a shopper instead of a browser? Let’s take a look! “I’m Just Looking at Various Things.” When someone opens their Pinterest app or goes on the desktop site, they simply start out looking and browsing what is being shared. Many times, they don’t go in with the intention of buying, but, by following a few steps, many do end up doing so. “Well, This is Interesting.” The next part of the anatomy of a Pinterest brain is that someone has to think the image, idea, or product looks interesting. The more interesting the pin, the more likely that person will be to click on the image and then the link attached, directing them to a site. This can then lead them to purchase the item from the picture. “I Need to Narrow This Down.” Many times, people who are browsing Pinterest will see a multitude of interesting things, but they want to make sure they narrow things down. This helps them decide which pins to share or which products to buy. “This is Exactly What I Need.” After narrowing things down, users will end up buying what they find to be exactly what they need. This is why it is important to make your pins stand out. You want it to be the winning pin for the Pinterest brain. Don’t worry; I am going to look at how you can achieve this later in the blog. 5 Incredible Advantages to Using Pinterest for Your Business Before I get into how you can make incredible revenue with a Pinterest account, I want to look at the advantages of joining. Some people might not be sure that it is a site they can use, but there are some incredible benefits to it. You Can Reach a Younger Demographic. Pinterest gives you access to a younger demographic, and while you might want to reach an older one, young people can really help your business. You shouldn’t ignore this demographic because you might be surprised just how much revenue you can bring in when you advertise to them. Pinterest is a great starting place for this. You Can Use it as a Marketing Tool on Your Site or in Your Store. If you have product images or blogs, you can add a Pinterest social share button to your site. This will encourage users and readers to pin anything they find interesting on their own account, therefore sharing it with their friend group. If their friends find it interesting, they will share that pin and so on. This can bring in more people to that product, blog, or landing page, and once there, you can convert them to leads. You Can Share More Than Just Your Products. When it comes to Pinterest, you aren’t limited to only sharing product images. In fact, you can share your blogs, other landing pages, and also share helpful information from industry leaders. You can create boards for each and every idea you have, helping to keep them all organized, and allowing people to follow the boards they find interesting. You Can Create a Board that Links to Your Blogs. Do you want to drive more traffic to your blogs? Then create … Read more