As many as 420 billion people are active on social media, with 54% of social browsers also using social media to research products, Hubspot reports. Optimizing your social media presence is, therefore, essential to boosting the reach and visibility of your content, and in turn increases engagement, clicks, traffic, and ultimately, sales. In particular, leveraging local SEO, optimizing your social media profiles, and improving your social searchability are key ways to help improve your overall performance on social media.

Leverage local SEO
Local SEO can optimize your social media profiles to boost traffic and leads from local search. If you’re based in Austin, for example, you should employ Austin SEO strategies that target locals in your target customer base. So, on a platform like Instagram, use local hashtags (like #austintexas and #downtownaustin) in your captions — these will appear in the Google search results. Additionally, encourage customers to post user-generated content as well as in-person tagging. This involves customers using your hashtags and posting photos of your products or services, including photos snapped at your physical premises. This, in combination with your Google Map’s listing, will give customers another route to your business through Google.
Optimize your profiles
Optimizing your social media profiles involves ensuring they all feature a consistent brand image that aligns with your business and its goals. This means checking if your creative visuals (such as, your fonts, logos, taglines, and hashtags) are consistent across profiles — this will improve brand recognition among customers. Also make sure you include correct links or CTAs that take your followers to the right landing page. Your social media presence is essentially an introduction to your brand and your products or services. When a customer finds you for the first time on social media, consistent branding and messaging keeps them engaged and prevents potential confusion. You want to ensure that potential customers never feel lost on your profiles, no matter how they find you.
Improve your social searchability
Improving your social searchability simply means making your business profiles more searchable, so people looking up recommendations, questions or phrases related to your industry will find your account. There’s no need to stuff your posts with keywords to do this, however. First, you need to do some keyword research to find relevant industry and brand-specific keywords to include across your posts. Then you’ll need to make sure all your bio sections are completely filled out and feature these keywords and keyword hashtags. Subtly and naturally including hashtags and keywords across your content will ultimately help boost its visibility without coming across as pushy or salesy. Also, check your basic business details like your @username, address, and contact options, which should be the same across all platforms.
Optimizing your social media presence is key to boosting the visibility of your business, standing out to customers, and staying ahead of the competition. Leveraging local SEO, optimizing your profiles, and improving your social searchability will boost customers and sales.

By Eddy

Eddy is the editorial columnist in Business Fundas, and oversees partner relationships. He posts articles of partners on various topics related to strategy, marketing, supply chain, technology management, social media, e-business, finance, economics and operations management. The articles posted are copyrighted under a Creative Commons unported license 4.0. To contact him, please direct your emails to [email protected].