The Stepping Stones of Social Media Optimization

Since social media started to become popular, it has grown from strength to strength. Now, it includes audio, video, graphics, text and more. These elements all work together in order to allow people to link with their friends and family, their colleagues, strangers with similar interests, businesses and more. Essentially, it is a new form of communication and consumers expect that they can use this form of communication with any business they express an interest in.

How to Perform Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization is all about enhancing the interaction you have as a business with your customers. A number of methods that make this possible include:

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• Blogging. Here, you have an opportunity to provide an opinion about a service or product that you offer, or anything else that has a relevance to your personal business. It is also an opportunity for audiences to engage by commenting on your blog. You have to make it interesting and you must apply SEO (search engine optimization) practices to it in order to get traffic, however.
• RSS feeds. These are not as popular anymore, but some old school internet users still love them. Essentially, it is like adding people to a mailing list without knowing their email address. You can inform your customers of anything new on your site because they will receive a link to it in their personal RSS feed.
• Being engaging on social media platforms. This is the most important element of all.

Which Social Media Platforms?

One big problem many businesses have is that they simply cannot build a presence on every social media platform there is. This is why they have to make some important choices. The three most vital platforms are:

• LinkedIn, used by those who are interested in the business side of your organization, perhaps for a job or for industry expertise.
• Twitter, where people expect you have little titbits of information relevant to something that is currently trending.
• Facebook, where your customers expect to be able to engage with you in full, ask you questions, make complaints and have their voices heard.

However, other sites are also growing and are becoming part of not just social media but also reputation management. The two are always intertwined, but this is becoming increasingly clear nowadays. As such, some of the sites you should also focus on include:

• Yelp, where customers leave reviews about your business, products and services.
• TripAdvisor, which is another review site more specific to eating, dining and sleeping experiences.
• The Better Business Bureau, where any official complaints and government investigations get listed.
• Amazon, if you list your products there.

Social media is all around us. People expect to be able to contact a business and have any issue resolved. Unfortunately, they very rarely speak to a business when things go right, whereas they tend to be very vocal when something goes wrong. However, you can use this to your advantage by showing others that you are happy to listen to people’s concerns and that you use that information to grow and become better.