Optimize Your Posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and More
November 10, 2015 | By Pam Dyer | No Comments">No Comments
Creating great content isn’t enough.
If you want people to share it, you must consider the dynamics of each of your social networks and optimize your posts for each. This will maximize sharing and help you build your brand, engage with your target customers, create brand ambassadors, and ultimately improve lead acquisition and sales. Failing to polish your posts means that your content won’t be shared as much, limiting your ability to grow your audience.
There are many tricks of the trade, such as including a shortened URL in your LinkedIn posts, using mobile-friendly images on Facebook, and applying the rule of thirds on Instagram. Employing these tactics will help your social media marketing efforts pay off.
Optimize your LinkedIn posts
- Status update: Your post should be up to date, informative, relevant, and attention-grabbing. Try to use 50 characters or less, and engage with your audience by asking questions.
- Provide a link: Adding a shortened link to your update will help direct more people to your content.
- Edit your description: Be concise and to-the-point. This will draw people’s attention and lead them to click.
- Interact with commenters: Engage in the conversation and build relationships with your audience.
- Research and analyze: Know your target audience and tailor the post to them. Use LinkedIn Insights to learn how well your previous posts have performed, and measure engagement through comments, shares, likes, and clicks.
Optimize your Facebook posts
- Keep things positive: Positivity breeds engagement and sharing, and helps inspire and excite your users.
- Provide information: The most appealing updates are those that offer something but don’t disclose everything, making fans want to click.
- Provide a link: If you include a link, use a URL shortener such as Bit.ly so you can track how many people are clicking through from Facebook.
- Include images: Posts with images receive the highest amount of Facebook engagement, so be sure to include one when you can.
- Mobile-friendly: Use simple imagery that scale so they will be easily viewable on mobile devices — 80-85% of your fans read posts on their phone.
- Engage with users: It’s not only posts that grab attention — comments and responses do, too. Engage with people and build relationships through conversational dialogue.
- Be available: Post when your audience is listening, not just when your business is open. This will ensure more user engagement.
Optimize your Twitter posts
- Call to action: Offer a clear CTA so your readers know what you want them to do.
- Punctuation: Don’t sacrifice grammar just because you only have 140 characters to work with. Avoid abbreviations and using all caps, which makes it look like you’re shouting.
- Shorten URLs: Bit.ly links generate the most retweets, so it’s important to shorten your URLs.
- Format: Use questions + facts and figures to engage users and drive retweets. Make sure to leave 20 characters so that people can add comments when they retweet.
- Mentions: Use @ mentions to prompt influencers to engage with you.
- Retweet: Retweet relevant content for your audience to keep them engaged.
Optimize your Pinterest posts
- Avoid human faces: Images without human faces them are shared 23% more on Pinterest than those that include them.
- Small background: Use a compelling background that doesn’t take up more than 40% of your image — otherwise you’ll see repins decrease by 50%.
- Red is best: Red or orange images receive twice as many repins.
- Multiple colors: Images with dominant colors (red, dark green, and pink) get 3x the number of likes and repins.
- Light and color: Images with 50% color saturation are repinned 4x more than those with 100% saturation and 10 times more than black and white images.
- Use portrait style: Vertically-oriented images perform better than horizontally-oriented images — the perfect ratios are 2:3 and 4:5.
Optimize your Google+ posts
- Tag brands and people: They will be notified and potentially engage with your post.
- Trending topics: Get involved with hot topics to show your brand is keeping up with real-time events. This will increase your brand’s visibility.
- Use hashtags: Increase your page’s reach by adding relevant hashtags to your posts. Keep in mind that Google+ will automatically add a hashtag to your post for key/trending topics.
- Use images: Using full-sized images (800×600 px) will make your posts stand out on the page vs. tiny images and thumbnails.
- Interact with commenters: Users and brand fans aren’t as active as they are on other social networks, so it’s important to make the most of comments.
- Find communities: Find relevant communities and make an effort to contribute to them. You’ll see an uptick in engagement as a result.
Optimize your YouTube posts
- Catchy title: This is what will get people to click and watch your video, so make sure it’s attention-grabbing and informative about the subject matter.
- Description: Describe your video further and include keywords to help viewers find it easily. Add links to your website and social channels.
- Call to action: Let viewers know in the description what you want them to do next, e.g. share, like, etc.
- Use tags: Get your video in front of more people by adding keyword tags — this will help it appear in more searches.
Optimize your Instagram posts
- Photo editing: Use apps like Camera+ and Snapspeed to enhance your photos and create a consistent look and feel for your feed.
- Rule of thirds: Putting the subject of the photo in only 2/3 of the screen makes it more attractive to the eye and improves engagement.
- Captions: Use relevant photo captions to grab attention. Including questions will help drive comments.
- Hashtags: Use some of the random hashtags that are popular to increase engagement.
- Reply: Send notes to people who have liked/commented to drive 2-way conversations. Keep it conversational rather than trying to push sales.
Optimize your Vine posts
- Hashtags: New users generally start exploring Vine via hashtags. Popular ones such as “loop” and “how-to” drive the most engagement. You can find trending hashtags in the “Trending” section in Explore.
- Find your style: People who stand out on Vine have their own style do a great job of communicating it. Try to portray what you love most in 6 seconds.
- Infinite loop: Master the infinite loop — a video that can seamlessly loop forever. To achieve this, your final scene needs to flow back into your original scene.
- Be still: Buy a tripod. A Vine video shot with a shaky camera is annoying and you won’t achieve the effect you’re going for.
- Be smart: Don’t rush the creation process. Even though you only have 6 seconds to work with, take your time and execute professionally. Resist the urge to cram too much in. Remember — you can’t edit clips once they’re posted.
- Background noise: This is difficult to control, but try to keep a steady hand and minimize the noise at the location where you’re shooting.
Optimize your Tumblr posts
- Know your post types: You have 7 options to choose from — text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video — so make sure that it’s the right one for your content.
- Follow people: Not only will you be more aware of the latest viral post and what people are talking about, following people will encourage them to follow you back.
- Know the lingo: In Tumblr Speak, “shipping” doesn’t have anything to do with ordering from Amazon and “what is air” isn’t a question for science class.
- Choose a good theme: Successful Tumblrs are pretty. There are many free themes to choose from, and the simplest ones look the nicest.
- Tagging: Tumblr uses hashtags like most other platforms, so use them to make your posts easy to find.
- Like and reblog: Tumblr is a very active platform. Liking and reblogging generates engagement.
Sources: Wired, Business Insider, Social Caffeine, Bitly, Mashable, Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today, Business2Community, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Pew Research, eMarketer, OPEN Forum, Search Engine Land, New York Times
Republished with permission from Pamorama.net.
