What is Social Media Optimization?

By Alaina Sheer
Chief Content Strategist, Cement Marketing

The most challenging element of taking on a social media campaign is wrapping our heads around everything that is going on out there. Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. All of these social mediums are the tools in our arsenal that we use to execute our social marketing message. But when we break it down and understand that the message is one constant that will never change, understand our tools and then move our campaign forward strategically we find clarity.

So where does social media optimization come in?

Social media optimization, by my definition, is the practice of maximizing your message. To effectively maximize a social media message a brand or organization must use their analytics while also factoring in the human barometer. Analytics available via Google, Facebook Insights, Hootsuite for Twitter and YouTube now afford us the ability to measure every social media action we take online during a social media campaign. So for example, if I post a tweet I can instantly measure the messages effectiveness by first tracking it in Hootsuite and then hopping over to Google Analytics to measure the true potency (time on site) of the visitors who clicked through.

But, for true social media optimization, we must also measure the human barometer – which I literally translate into our audience’s reaction. Are they into it or not? If the analytics tell us they’re not but feedback is limited from our audience than we, as a brand, must go out and actually ask our audience what we can do to improve our campaign. The possibilities here are endless as our audience can literally shape our message by making it their own in a matter of minutes. In reality, however, this is something that happens over months and months. Social media optimization ultimately requires our patience as we mold and shape our campaigns in real time.

The keys to executing a successful social media campaign: consistency, relevancy, and commitment.

More here and more on how to craft a social media message in a presentation I just delivered for the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Find out more at the Sway Social Media Workshop, coming up next week. Details here.

Follow Alaina on Twitter.

Cement Marketing is a full service Web Design, Social Media and Search Engine Optimization agency in Columbus, Ohio located at 2489 Summit St., Suite A, Columbus Ohio 43202.

Tags | social marketing columbus, social media marketing, social media optimization, social media tools