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The Engagement 4Cast
Welcome back to Part 2 of our “Google Ads vs. Social Media” series. If you missed last week’s blog, Why Google Ads are Losing to Social Media Platforms, please check it out. That post ended with a data-driven recommendation that marketers need to diversify their marketing strategies. It’s no longer enough to bid on keywords in Google Ads and boost a post on Facebook. But unless you’ve got a full marketing team and/or good-sized advertising budget, it can be challenging to capture social traffic. This week we focus on low-lift strategies to help you diversify and succeed, without breaking the bank.
We recommend a few easy tactics to optimize your site for social media, before tackling a social ad campaign. These Social Media Optimization (SMO) tactics make your site as attractive and accessible as possible to a social media audience. It goes without saying that the most important thing you can do is publish interesting, relevant, and frequent content on your site. But beyond that, there are some relatively easy things you can do to make sure your site gets discovered by your target audience on social media:
When your followers share your content with no prompting – you are hitting marketing gold. So make it as easy as possible for your website visitors to share your content on social. Integrate social sharing buttons onto your website pages. While the popular AddThis tool was recently shuttered, there are a number of other free alternatives, like Elfsight and AddToAny.
We all know that when you craft engaging and concise meta tags, including title tags and meta descriptions, you make it easier for people (and search engines) to find your content. But did you know that there is a specific set of tags used by social media sites? Open Graph, or “og” tags, were first introduced by Facebook, but have been adopted by many popular platforms to not only index your content, but to optimize its display. Here’s a great introductory post about it from ahrefs, a blog I read regularly.
There are thousands of free widgets available to publish social media feeds on your website. Yes, they’ve been around forever, but they are only becoming more important as the world becomes more social literate and social obsessed. Besides being a good way to engage your colleagues to create content for your brand, it will help with your search engine ranking. There are many lists of “best” widgets out there. We recommend starting with some of the native methods developed by the social media platforms themselves: Facebook Page Plugin, LinkedIn, and Twitter (I mean “X”:)).
When you share links from your website on social media, images play a crucial role in attracting attention. Possibly the most crucial role. So ensure that your website’s images are visually appealing, relevant, and properly optimized for social media platforms. For example, if you use a CMS like WordPress, make sure your pages have a feature image set. Also, try to avoid images that have strange dimensions. The safest size is 1080×1080. That will help ensure that when your image gets cropped and scaled by LinkedIn and the like, it will hold up.
It’s worth repeating: stay active on social media and build a relationship with your audience. You might also consider implementing a social media management suite, like Loomly, Agorapulse, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social. For a limited investment, tools like these can be a game changer.
As social media continues to climb in popularity and uses, now is the time to start utilizing it effectively. Remember, a relatively small SMO effort can result in bigtime traffic to your website.
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