The social sphere continues to grow. As we reach an age of social media dominance in a new era of online marketing, it’s time to start optimising your social channels for brand success in 2024.
Social media has become a hub for communication and commerce in the last few years. Home to nearly 5 billion users, social channels present the most opportunity for online brands to thrive in 2024.
In fact, a whopping 75% of internet users now use a social channel to research a brand. With this in mind, it’s time to start making your brand more visible in the social sphere.
Improving your social media SEO is essential if you want to improve your searchability. So, here are eight SEO tactics for your social strategy in 2024 that will have your brand appearing at the top of your demographic’s feed.
Optimise Your Profile Information
One of the easiest places to start your social SEO journey is your social media profiles. Whether you’re working on TikTok or Instagram, ensure that your profiles are fully completed and operating as a business account.
This not only helps enhance your reach but can increase consumer trust when researching your brand.
Once you’ve done this, it’s time to take a look at your bio. For instance, if you run a sustainable beauty company, ensure your bio contains keywords such as ‘eco-friendly manufacturer’ or ‘handmade’. Anything that will help your profile appear within the correct user search.
Maintain Consistent Branding
In the same way as your website, your social media channels benefit from operating under the same design. We’re talking colours, fonts and logos.
The more consistent your branding is over your social channels, the more recognisable it will be during a social search.
This also applies to your social content too. Maintaining your branding colours and styles within your content graphics is a great way to keep your brand looking consistent within its posting habits!
Take this example from Guayaki Yerba Mate. Within every social post across each platform, they always post an image containing one of their brightly coloured yellow drinks, making their brand easily recognisable as you scroll through your feed.
Prioritise Keyword-Rich Content
Keywords are the key to successful SEO. If you want to drive targeted online traffic, it’s essential to write content that is full of key terms and phrases relating to your industry.
Following the same practices as you would on your website, ensure that you prioritise keyword-rich social content too.
This can be within your bio, content captions and even social hashtags. Keywords make your brand more likely to appear in a consumer social search, so don’t forget them!
Monitor Your Engagement Metrics
If you want to boost your visibility, keeping track of your engagement metrics will help. If you have a higher number of shares, likes, and comments within your post, it’ll be twice as searchable for your target consumers.
Encourage your followers to interact (like, share, and comment) with your social media content in order to improve your engagement rate. This includes inserting simple call-to-actions and fun posts such as competitions and sharable images/videos.
Take this example from Costellos Bakery. Offering weekly social media content, the brand encourages consumers to like and share their content for a chance to win some baked goods. This, in turn, boosts engagement and increases their chances of being seen within their niche.
Hashtag Strategically
Hashtagging is also an essential social SEO technique. These are essentially search terms that header their very own social category.
Researching and using trending industry-specific hashtags will make you more likely to be seen during a consumer search session.
For example, a travel agency may be more inclined to use hashtags such as #Wanderlust or #TravelGoals2024 to help reach a broader audience.
Invest In Video Content
Video content drives social success. After seeing the rise of TikTok’s social domination, their winning formula of under-60-second snippets is not to be missed when revamping your social strategy.
Did you know that 74% of consumers take action after viewing a branded video on social media? Better still, video content can also be embedded into your website, increasing your searchability all-round.
Leverage User-generated Content (UGC)
Posting authentic material is a great way to boost your organic searchability. Consumers are more likely to share their own content, which helps drive brand engagement and, in turn, your searchability online.
The key here is to open up more opportunities for your followers to create user-generated content (UGC). This could be in the form of competitions or even shareable content trends that can be linked to your brand using a clever and memorable hashtag.
Take this example from Apple. Their UGC campaign, ‘Shot On iPhone,’ has taken off in the last few years, appearing all over their social media pages, website, and even billboards. The brand knows how to use UGC content to its advantage.
With the chance to see themselves on Apple’s social platforms, more consumers than ever before are engaging with the brand as well as searching and sharing their content for a chance to be featured.
Engage In Cross-Promotion
Last but not least, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of cross-promotion. If you want to increase your social searchability, optimising all your channels is essential.
This includes cross-linking and promoting across different social platforms. This increases your visibility by allowing followers of one channel to travel seamlessly to your other platforms.
For example, if you post a TikTok video containing branded content, ensure you share a link to it on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Better still, why not create platform-optimised versions of your content to accompany your links to its original source?
Social SEO In 2024 and Beyond
As we increasingly use social media to promote our brands, the competition to be seen by the consumer will continue to rise. Prioritising your social SEO is essential if you want to keep your engagement levels increasing.
The key to dominating the social scene in 2024 and beyond is to optimise your content keywords, leverage user-generated content and practice sharability to remain relevant in a sea of competitors.
All the photos in the article are provided by the company(s) mentioned in the article and are used with permission.
