Optimizing Your Social Media Profiles

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Company Page

A LinkedIn page allows your organization to create a central hub for information about your company, career opportunities, products and services. Ensure you fill in all company information fields. Including specialities and industry. You can also highlight key vacancies within your organization. If its appropriate for your business you can display your company name a description in more than 20 languages by editing your page via the overview tab. Expand your organization's following on LinkedIn by encouraging employees to connect their profiles to your company page in their current job descriptions. It's important for your employees to understand the value of building an appropriate personal LinkedIn profile so that they represent the organization in a professional manner. Your employees are you best brand advocates so encourage them to amplify company content and announcements for hiring initiatives through their own networks. You can also add showcase pages to your company page. Showcase pages let you segment you companies offerings by target market. They're a great way to focus on different products separately so you can customize positioning and messaging. Use them to share content that could be valuable to your viewer such as whitepapers, videos and case studies. You'll need to grow a following for each page in scratch so as a solution for highlighting products - showcasing works best with larger companies.

Optimizing Your Instagram Profile

Business accounts offer unique benefits that allow you to engage with your audience more effectively. Business accounts allow you to add contact and industry details to your profile. Making it easy for viewers to get in touch with you directly through the app. You must include at least one contact option in the form of an email, phone number or street address. These details creates the call to action on your profile. On Instagram you have just 150 characters to create a memorable and informative bio. This is a great spot for you to highlight a branded hashtag to use when sharing images. Instagram doesn't offer many options for formatting your bio with within the app so to go around this, draft your bio on the notes app of your device. Then paste your formatted copy into the bio field. This will allow you to add line breaks, keeping your bio easy to read. The website field is the only spot on Instagram where you can add a clickable link. Choose the best page for you visitors to land on, like your blog or online shop. Or create a custom landing page created just for Instagram users. If you're running a campaign, consider temporarily changing the website link to one related to it for support. Most people use Instagram on a mobile device so this means that whatever your link leads to it should be mobile friendly. In your account settings, make sure to link your third-party social networking accounts so that photos you share can easily be cross posted to your other profiles. You should also keep an eye out on how people are interacting with your content. Instagram allows users to tag others in their photos. Photos in which you are tagged are accessible to the public from your profile. Reviewing these pictures is a great way of discovering content from your customers and ensures that the photos your tagged in are appropriate for your brand. You can choose to manually tag photos, hide them from your profile or choose to remove tags entirely. You can moderate the comment section of your content through custom keywords or a preset setting by Instagram. If you are to use Instagram's story feature, you can adjust who sees it and who's allowed to reply with a message under story settings. There is an Instagram insights and analytics feature only available to business accounts provides actionable metrics about what content resonates with your audience based on your post's impressions, reach and profile views. Insights also gives you additional details about your followers such as the times of day when they're most active, age range, gender and location. All of which you can tailor your profile and activity for optimum engagement.

Optimizing Your Facebook Pages Profile

If you're a page admin, editor or moderator you can add a call to action button to your page. Facebook offers a variety of call to action buttons such as: Call Now, Contact Us, Send Message, Sign Up, Send Email - choose one that best supports you business objectives. Third party apps can play a big part in optimizing your Facebook page - choose from hundreds of third part app integrations including: Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Only show those that support you business objectives. An app like MailChimp lets users opt in to your email newsletter without navigating away from Facebook. If you have a brick and mortar business, including address and contact information is particularly important - your location will ensure that search engines will index you at local search results and gives customers an easy way to contact you. This will also add a map in your profile so if you don't need visitors to find your physical location you might want to skip this field and dedicate profile space to other elements. To help build community - you can feature other businesses Facebook pages. This is a great way of building valuable working relationships with other companies that share a similar vision. To feature other pages, you'll first need to like the page and add the featured like column to your page.

Strategic Best Practices for Facebook Pages

It's important to have more than one person assigned to managed your Facebook page. In case the profile of the person who created it is ever compromised. Under the page roles tab in settings you can choose from different roles with varying degrees of access to page functions. Include at least two admins to manage all aspects of the page. And add editors, moderators, advertisers and analysts as needed. Under page settings you can control the public's ability to tag your photos, post to your page and reach out to you in private message. Allowing people to post to your page and tag photos is a great way to allow your community to interact with you brand. However, this may require a lot of moderation for pages with many followers so consider disabling this feature if you aren't able to monitor you timeline daily. If you choose to let other people post to your page you can take preemptive measures to filter out inappropriate comments or posts. The profanity filter blocks comments of language and under page moderation you can block specific words so that comments and posts including them are marked as spam. If you see a competitor with an impressive Facebook strategy you can learn from them by using a handy feature called pages to watch under the insights tab. Once you add five or more pages you can see how yours stacks up the competition based on reach, weekly audience growth, posting volume and the number of engagement interactions. Clicking on the page title will bring up the top posts on that page for the week which is great content to review for ideas and inspiration.

Strategic Best Practices for Twitter Lists

On Twitter you have the ability to curate lists to keep track of relevant information by organizing similar accounts into groups. For e.g. you might have a list of industry influencers or media outlet that can help amplify you events or one for key customers or even brand advocates. Twitter lists can be private or public. Public lists are great for curating accounts that maybe of interest to your followers such as businesses you company supports or a list of influencers you work with. Users get notifications when you add them to your list, which may motivate them to check out your profile and follow you. You can also subscribe to public lists curated by other users which is a quick way to broaden your exposure to potentially useful information. Private Twitter lists are only visible to you. This makes private lists a great way to keep up with competitor content without publicly following their profiles. You can also use lists to research prospective customers, giving you insight in their daily conversations and potentially paving the way for future interactions.

Optimizing Your Twitter Business Profile

The media gallery on your profile showcases your most recently tweeted photos or videos. If your media gallery is not yet populated, post a minimum of six tweets with visually striking photos or videos relevant to your business. Boosting the visual impact of your page. When selecting the location of your Twitter profile, think about where you connect with your customers. If you deal with local customers, use your precise physical location to help them find your business. If you target a specific area outside your physical location select a location where the bulk of your customers reside. Ensuring you are represented in their local search results. And if your business has customers spanning multiple regions or has no physical location or headquarters feel free to leave this field blank. You have just 160 characters for you bio field so use them wisely. If you maintain a seperate Twitter profile to provide customer support be sure to add that handle in the bio field of your main profile so customers can get in touch easily. If your company uses a branded hashtag, your bio is a great place to share it. A branded hashtag is a great way to encourage your audience to interact with your brand and start conversations about your products. If you'll be using your account to interact with customers, consider adjusting your settings to allow for direct messaging from anyone. This way customers can contact you without you having to follow them first. Your likes tab is prominently displayed and accessible from your Twitter profile. From here, visitors can see the tweets you've liked which provides an opportunity to use liking strategically. For e.g. you can use your likes tab to create a collection of media articles and positive shoutouts about your brand and products. Displaying mentions from reputable accounts is an excellent way to provide social proof for you business.

Best Practices for Optimizing Social Media Profiles

The steps to set up and configure your profile differ by network. But there are generally accepted best practices that can help you generate traffic, engage visitors and increase conversions. Engaging visuals are vital to making a great first impression to visitors of your social properties. Capture attention with bright, vivid, high resolution images. Your profile picture should be easily recognizable even at thumbnail size. Your logo is the best choice, but if it doesn't present well as a profile picture - consider an adapted version. On Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn you can upload a cover photo to compliment your profile picture. Use this space strategically. For e.g. its a great place to announce product releases or generate interest in up-coming events. View the cover images on both desktop and mobile devices to ensure it displays correctly on both. Provide a business description across all channels. Use SEO friendly keywords that describe your company and incorporate them in the copy of your about section. Only the first 140 characters will appear on search engine results so be sure to convey the most important information first. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram all allow you to place a link within your bio. Take advantage of this, and link to the most relevant area of your website. Keep in mind, that most users view social media pages on mobile devices so its best to ensure the website you link to is best optimized in mobile. Consider to highlight your social presence to potential new followers. Add social badges to your companies website, email signatures to drive traffic to your social profiles. You can find the code for this on each platform's developer page. If you have a company blog, add social buttons. When visitors engage by liking or pinning your posts your content is shared with their followers - this showcases your content to a new audience.

Optimizing Your Youtube Profile Settings Practices

To optimize your Youtube profile, start with your channel title. Using your company name is generally best but if you're not using it make sure it clearly reflects your brand. You'll want to select a high-res image for your avatar that reflects you channels branding. And displays well as a thumbnail in multiple devices. Think about how best to organize your content for viewers - playlists work well for group relevant videos. It allows your audience to progress naturally from video to video generating more views through their session. Channel sections allow you to group multiple playlists together in a single space. For e.g. say you're a B2B that serves both small and enterprise size companies. You can create two separate channel sections aimed at each audience. A channel trailer is what viewers first see when they come to your channel. Think carefully about what you want to convey to visitors because it's a prime opportunity to welcome new viewers and familiarize them with your company. You'll also want to link your third-party social profiles to your Youtube channel. So viewers can engage with you in their network of choice. When it comes to optimizing videos - there are three areas to consider. First: the individual thumbnail, title, description. Second: The meta data. Third: Click-able overlays. The thumbnail image should look good in multiple sizes and accurately represent the content of the video. A well crafted title should help the viewer decide whether to watch the video. It should be short, descriptive and include keywords first. Where relevant, include an episode number at the end of the title to make it easy for someone to view it in order. A good way to gauge the effectiveness of the title and thumbnail is to look at the engagement in the first 10 to 15 seconds of the video. If a large portion of viewers are leaving - they likely didn't see what they expected so take some time to adjust. A strong description that accurately explains what a viewer can expect also helps Youtube's algorithms better index you video. Which aids discover-ability. Incorporate important keywords in the first three lines of the description since this is what's automatically visible when videos show up on search results. Or embeds in other social networks. The description from the 4th line on is only visible when someone clicks "see more". And so is better suited to relevant links to your website or landing page. Meta tags are important because they help categorize your video for search engines. Use accurate keywords that are relevant to the content of your video. If you're an advanced Youtube user, consider uploading caption files for your videos, in addition to making your content accessible to other language speakers, caption files is extensive addition to meta data that boosts the discover-ability of content. Businesses can leverage Youtube's additional features such as end-screens and cards to entice viewers to watch more content, increase community engagement and acquire new subscribers. And display a specific call to action. Note, that in order to use video cards you must first associate your website with your Youtube account. Under branding, you can also add a custom watermark with a specific call to action. For e.g. subscribe. For a more professional look.