Taking the time and effort to create the perfect social media post
has never been more important. All social media platforms are swamped
with content – both good and bad. After you’ve taken the time to create
great content or curated something to share, you need to present it in
the smartest possible way.
“Content is currency — something we trade for our audience’s attention.” Frank Strong
I think that social media is the new television
and that you need to be entertaining and informative with your social
media. You’ve worked hard to build your content strategy but having a
laser beam focus on only your brand doesn’t always build or maintain
people’s attention which is as best around seven to ten seconds. The
average attention span was twelve seconds in 2000 and was eight seconds
in 2012 according to Statistic Brain. Wow, right?
So, what does this mean for today’s social media marketers and
professionals? You need to be entertaining and add some fun into your
social media content mix. Promoting only your product, book or blog
non-stop won’t be interesting to anyone, most likely not even yourself.
Keeping your ratio of content at 90 percent other people’s content (OPC)
and 10 percent your own content will help you but don’t be too dry or
stuffy when you create your editorial calendar.
Tips by social media platform
1. Use great images on each post. 800 pixels x 600 pixels or 800 pixels x 1200 pixels look fantastic.
2. Make your posts stand out! — It
don’t mean a thing if it don’t have that bling! Use some formatting to
give your posts some pizzazz. Give your post a bold title, and use some
italics, sprinkle in a few relevant hashtags and voila! Your post is
ready to go.
3. Make sure you give credit to the source of the text and photo that
you are sharing. Being a good citizen by giving proper credit is very
important.
1. Create niche boards with a tight theme.
2. Add descriptions of 200 characters with keywords to help people find your pins through search.
3. Create vertical images to maximize your real estate. Pinterest
images should be long and narrow to take up the maximum amount of visual
space and get noticed! Look at your favorite pins and see what the
images have in common so you see what types of images are repinned and
shared. I create images that are up to 735 pixels by 1102 pixels. This
creates an engaging invitation to repin your pinned article. Edit the
pin to add the link in the source.
1. Write tweets between 120 and 130 characters – leave room for
retweets with comments. 2. Tweet links at a slow pace – use Buffer or
Hootsuite to schedule your tweet. 3. Use action words in your tweets.
Facebook:
1. Post consistently to stay in the News Feed. 2. Add variety to your
content by posting photos, videos, and articles. 3. Have fun with your
Facebook posts – this is a more personal network so let people get to
know you here.
LinkedIn:
1. Be relevant. LinkedIn is the place to show your smarts. I don’t
recommend posting quotes as status updates here. I love them on
Pinterest and Twitter but I don’t feel they carry enough weight for a
LinkedIn update.
2. Be consistent. Post at least one update per day and up to four per
day spread out through the day to remain active in the LinkedIn stream.
3. Quality counts. Share your own content as well as the best content
in your field of focus. The content that you curate and share reflects
your own content and should be strong.
Start with basic video SEO
The next step of making your videos work for you is optimizing them for search.
Your primary goal is to get a video
to rank in the results of YouTube searches, but it’ll have an added
benefit of ranking in Google results as well:
Videos often show up in Google results, and it can drive a decent number of views to your video.
I wouldn’t rely on showing up in
Google because videos don’t show up in all searches. However, it can be a
nice boost to your views, and you can maximize your chance of showing
up in searches by targeting phrases with the following keywords in them:
- tutorial
- review
- test
- what is ____
- video
- explanation
- how to ____
- walkthrough
Now back to YouTube optimization. There are two major parts of the ranking algorithm that you need to optimize for.
Part #1 – Your video information: The first thing YouTube looks for is whether your video is relevant to a search.
It’s a fairly simple search engine; it looks for keywords in three areas of your video:
- the title
- the description
- the tags
You don’t need to—and shouldn’t—keyword-stuff.
Include your keyword once in the title, once or twice in your description, and in the tags if it makes sense.
Here’s an example of the description from Brian Dean’s “advanced SEO” YouTube video that he ranks highly for:
He mentions the keyword at the very start and the very end of it.
But notice there’s a lot more to the description than just the keyword.
YouTube doesn’t have much to work
with when it comes to ranking videos. The title is only a sentence long,
and tags can’t be weighed too heavily because they contain limited
information.
This makes the description the main source of additional information for YouTube’s algorithm.
By including a detailed description
of the video, you’ll naturally include related terms the algorithm can
use to understand the topic of your video. This will make it easier to
rank for relevant terms.
Part #2 – User engagement and feedback: Not surprisingly, YouTube’s algorithm has taken an approach to ranking videos that’s similar to Google’s approach.
Instead of just using the basic information an uploader provided with a video, it also looks at how users interact with your video.
The simple concept behind it is that
if users are indicating they really like your video, it’s probably a
good one to show to more people. Naturally, the algorithm ranks it
higher.
So, what does it look at?
There are a few major areas of user feedback YouTube can consider when evaluating a video.
The first is how much of the video most viewers are watching.
If they all drop off after the first 10 seconds, that’s a bad sign. But if 50%- 60% of your viewers watch the whole video, that’s fantastic.
You can check this in your account’s statistics, where you’ll see a graph similar to the one above.
Where else can YouTube get feedback from?
- Overall views –
From YouTube’s perspective, if a video is getting a lot of views without
its help in the search rankings, it must be good. More views typically
lead to better rankings (as long as the audience retention is good).
- Rating (thumbs up and down) – Users can also rate a video by giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. The higher this ratio is, the better.
- Views to subscribers – If
a video is really good, a lot of people who view it will click the
“Subscribe” button underneath. Similarly, no one will subscribe after
watching a bad video.
- Views to favorites or social shares – Just like with subscribing, people will also share a video only if they like it.
- Comments – If a video is inspiring a lot of comments, it may be good. YouTube can’t put much weight on the comment count since comments could be negative too.
Using all these factors, YouTube comes up with an appropriate score for each video to decide how to rank it.
The biggest thing you can do to optimize these engagement factors is to make high quality videos (as discussed above).
