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Marketing your business is never easy. It consists of a hodge-podge of different content, channels, and audiences, each different for every industry and niche.
You also don’t want your audience to feel like you are marketing to them too heavily and scare them away – to the customer every interaction has to seem genuine, not like marketing.
Although paid advertising can help boost your posts, there is still a lot you can do organically. So, how do you get the most out of your organic marketing?
Optimizing Your Social Media Accounts
It might not surprise you that social media platforms use the same types of SEO algorithms as Google. That’s right, all that SEO research you did for your website can be applied to optimize your social accounts.
Pretty much every aspect of your social media profile can be optimized for better visibility. Your description and username should fit your business well. Up to 46% percent of people go on social media already with the intent to purchase, so make yourself easy to find.
It is important to start with optimizing your own accounts, it will help increase your organic visibility, and by the time you start posting new optimized content, the links will lead back to your newly optimized accounts and/or website, and ideally lead your customers towards buying your products or services.
To start off right make sure you have the following ready:
- An easy to remember username/continuity between platforms
- A recognizable photo/brand logo
- Keyword-driven descriptions (that still sound natural and are on-brand)
- A trackable link that leads back to your website
The same applies when posting. Use these same factors to choose which images you use, what keywords you include in each post, and how you phrase your call-to-action (CTA).
Organic Posts
Organic posting is about using the free tools provided by each social platform to build a social community and interact with it, sharing posts and responding to customer comments and feedback. It is ideal for community management but can do so much more.
However, increasing visibility and reaching your audience isn’t necessarily about posting more, it’s about posting quality content that will regularly engage your audience.
Don’t spam your accounts with one-use content just in the hope that someone will like or share it. If you post too much it will actually hurt your organic reach potential.
Your customers need to find your content useful to them. How-to guides, whitepapers, blog posts etc., all build credibility for your brand and will drive more customers your way.
As a general rule, we think the right balance is roughly 80% of your content being helpful resources, while 20% can promote your brand, products or services.
This should also be a mix of blogs, videos, images, and other engaging content types.
When Should You Post?
Oftentimes, it’s also about when you post. Counter-intuitively, posting during slow hours actually has better results for organic reach. If you post during peak hours, you’re just hurling your content into the quagmire of posts people are seeing at those times and the algorithms might boot your content if it’s not good enough.
Our data tells us that these are generally the best times to posts:
- Facebook – (Thursdays/Fridays) between 1pm and 3pm
- Twitter – (Weekdays) between 12pm and 6pm
- LinkedIn – (Tuesday – Thursday) between 7am/8am and 5pm/6pm
However, this is just a guideline and you should look into data from your own audience and platform whenever possible.
Targeting to Increase Organic Reach
Although this tactic will vary from platform-to-platform, you can tweak the settings of your posts to target specific sub-sections of your audience to give you a boost in organic reach potential. This will be one of your most valuable tools in reaching and targeting your specific audience.
On Facebook, for example, you can use the News Feed Targeting to tweak who will see it in their news feed.
There are nine options on Facebook you can use:
- Gender
- Relationship
- Status
- Education level
- Age
- Location
- Language
- Interests
- Post end date
Although not exactly the same process, similar options are available on Twitter. Their #hashtags allow you to quickly and easily categorize your posts and target specific audiences within the platform.
LinkedIn is almost the same as Facebook, but they make it much harder to target specific groups, unless they already follow you. LinkedIn Pages must have at least 300 followers per selected targeting option to successfully publish a targeted post in that audience’s feed. In other words, if you try to target “researchers in Asia,” your page must have at least 300 followers who live in Asia and are researchers. There are no requirements for targeting Facebook Page posts.
Conclusion
Now that you know about these extra features you can go and optimize all of your social media platforms and work towards more online visibility with optimized posts. Remember, this won’t happen overnight, you will have to build your followers slowly at first, but your work will pay off if you stick with it. You can also further boost your organic posts with paid advertising and paid features to better target your ads.
About the author
Michelene Maguire
Michelene Maguire is a marketer focused in the technology industry. Her company, Maguire Marketing Group, is a Marketing Agency that takes companies where they want to grow. Her specialty is creating and producing content that engages your audience with you, your brand, or your product. She recently published a book “Get More Customers Using Google My Business” available on Amazon.
