Optimizing your social media profiles means ensuring that you are set up in a way that presents your brand effectively and encourages engagement from your target audience. Think of each respective platform like an outpost for your business: they’re the boots on the ground that represent who you are and what you stand for online.
In this article, you’ll find 3 super simple, tactical ways to help your brand show up with its best foot forward online PLUS read all the way to the end to find out how to ensure brand consistency in a way that cranks up red hot engagement with your biggest fans WITHOUT spending hours planning out and posting content to fill out a picture-perfect grid.
Here are three specific steps that small businesses can take to optimize their social media profiles and boost engagement
1. Complete Your Profile Information
Fill out all the fields in your social media profiles with accurate and relevant information. Depending on what platform you’re on, this will vary a little bit, but this includes your profile picture, cover photo, bio, location, contact information, website URL, and any other relevant details.
At a minimum, make sure your branding, such as your logo and color scheme, is consistent across platforms. Getting this information accurate and completely filled in is the very least that you can do to make sure that if someone clicks into your account, they’re welcomed by a profile that looks and feels like your brand - even if you don’t post frequently on this platform!
Claim your handles everywhere, especially on new platforms that pop up, so you at least have the option to devote resources later, and so you don’t end up with squatters stealing your preferred @handles, which can be a huge pain.
2. Craft a Compelling Bio and Use Keywords
Your bio is often the first thing visitors see when they land on your profile. Write a concise and engaging bio that effectively communicates your brand's identity, values, and unique selling points.
Use language that resonates with your target audience and encourages them to follow or engage with your content. Look at your comments, customer support emails, reviews, and tagged posts to see the real words your customers use to talk about your brand!
Incorporate relevant keywords in your profile bio and descriptions. These keywords should reflect what your business does and the products or services you offer. Using keywords can help improve your profile's discoverability in search results on social media platforms.
Not only do these keywords help you get found on the platforms themselves, but there is also SEO juice that gets generated in search results, as well.
3. Balance educational content with lightheartedness
When it comes to educational content on social, be GENEROUS with what you share! At Strong Brand Social, we do our best to ignore scarcity mindset, and instead give give give our best stuff away for free, as often as we can.
This can be quick tutorials, industry insights, and case studies. And if you don’t know - ASK! Survey them or ask questions in your Stories to see what you’re people want to hear about, or what they’re curious about right now.
In the midst of all this valuable content, though, we want to entertain on social, as well. And that means humor, memes, silly questions, and content that gets the heads nodding because IYKYK. This content isn’t all about directly selling; it’s about providing the best content on the planet for YOUR audience, from a point of view that is distinctly yours.
And speaking of point of view…
A bold point of view is more powerful than your brand’s aesthetic
The #1 way to stand out in a saturated market, that doesn’t require a grid theme or layout, that’ll protect you from the platforms changing, and to:
→ Cut through the noise on social
→ Command attention from your followers and like-minded souls
→ And be impossible to ignore
is to establish a point of view for your brand that serves as the lifeblood DNA of all your messaging and content across every platform.
When you truly define your brand’s voice, you’re tapping into a force that can stand behind every piece of messaging you create to make sure every post packs maximum punch, without over indexing your time, resources, and attention on curating a pixel-perfect aesthetic for your grid.
That doesn’t mean you don’t have to care what your content looks like. What we’re saying is it can look however you want it to look, provided that what you’re communicating – despite the look – will connect with your audience and shine through.
