Having an online presence is a must for marketing in today’s world. Social Media is a platform that should be used by marketers to leverage their business in the digital world. While there were questions about why you should use social media for your business, the question has now shifted to how you should use social media for your business. Marketing your business is a challenge that needs a very strong strategy to deal with. The basics of your social media strategy are to define the aim of your social media presence and to set your goals and parameters as to what to achieve and how to achieve. Let’s break down the hurdle for an effective social media strategy into few simple steps:

1. Set specific goals and objectives

The initial step in the process of social media marketing is to specify certain goals and objectives. Some of your goals could be creating brand awareness, increasing customer engagement and creating conversions. Remember, there are different strategies for different goals. You have to decide what you want from your audience. When you want more brand awareness, you have to prepare your strategy for attracting more and more unique visitors to your website. When you wish to get more customer engagement, you have to be focused on getting more likes and comments on your social media posts. Having a clear goal in your mind really helps to create an effective social media strategy. Here are the major goal ideas:

• Creating Brand Awareness
• Increasing Customer Engagement
• Lead Generation
• Revenue Generation
• Increase Signups, newsletters, subscriptions
• Build a Strong Online Community
• Get More Traffic to your Website
• Grow Press and Media Mentions

2. Track your competitors

Keeping track of your competitors can help you learn about the strategies used by them to target their audience. Learn from their mistakes and implement their strategies. Look at the posts that are getting them more engagements and do a detailed research on them.

3. Post engaging content

Engaging and attractive content can draw the audience’s attention and drive more traffic to your platform. When you post content on social media that are not engaging enough, it is likely that you won't get new followers and even lose your current followers. To increase the visibility of your posts, you have to create fresh and engaging content consistently.

The different types of contents that you can share are:

• Blog Posts
• Videos
• Images
• Infographics
• News
• eBooks

4. Use Tools

When you are focused on making the best use of social media, it is really important to make use of a good tool. There are social media tools in the market that lets you schedule posts for future and help you keep organized. Some of the most useful tools for social media optimization are Buffer, Social Oomph, HootSuite, Sprout Social, etc.

5. Track, analyze & optimize

Once you have followed all the steps you need to figure out if the efforts that you are putting is paying off. You need to track, analyze and optimize your measures to increase your chances of success in the social media arena.

What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a crucial factor in SEO. SMO in the basic terms is all about using various channels to expand the awareness of a product, brand or service. The major social media platforms involved in the process are social news sites, social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, blogging sites and various video sharing sites.

A proper SMO service would include services like -

• Creating interesting online content which includes texts and digital photos that grab the attention of the readers and entice them to get engaged with the content.

• Maintaining Online Reputation Management (ORM) by restricting the negative feedbacks of a business from surfacing on the list of search engine results.

• Functioning as a supporter of SEO services

Why is it important for your website?

The SMO service for a website impacts the ranking for a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines use the data collected from social media channels and use it to rank a website in the SERPs. SMO gives a social exposure to your website and works as an advantage to the SEO services used by a website.