5 Simple Social Media Optimizations with Tremendous Impact
Social media is an important source for visitors to your websites, landing pages, and offers. With over 4.62 billion people actively using social media in 2022 and more and more people joining the platforms, the importance of social media as a traffic source cannot be ignored.
what is social media optimization ?
But how can you tell if your social media campaigns are working or not?
In this article, we'll talk about some of the lesser-known technical optimizations in social media that you need to keep in mind to properly allocate traffic, better understand your users, and increase the number of content shared.
1. Setting UTM tracking codes in your social links
Urchin Tracking Modules (UTM) are used to track traffic sources. By adding a UTM code to your landing page URL, you can determine exactly which social campaigns generate the most traffic. The best thing about UTMs is that they can be tracked through Google Analytics and are not affected by Facebook pixels or other third-party cookies.
A UTM connection consists of 3 parameters:
Source: To know where the traffic is coming from (search engines, social media, emails, etc.)
Medium: To know what kind of traffic you are receiving (organic, paid, via referrals, etc.)
Campaign: To know the target source or specific campaign that generated the traffic (landing pages, free trial, CTAs, etc.)
Benefits of UTM tracking codes
Now let's take a look at some of the benefits of adding UTMs to your social links:
Identify your most powerful content on social media platforms
Track visitor engagement from specific sources by examining the time spent on the target websites.
Use conversion tracking to measure ROI
Test different CTAs, headings and texts to find the most successful version.
Reduce low-performance content to optimize your advertising efforts
The most effective tool for creating a UTM link is Campaign URL Builder, which was developed by Google. You only need to fill in four fields, and the UTM link will be generated automatically.
Website: The URL on which visitors should land.
Source: Your traffic source (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
Medium: Whether organic, paid or through recommendations.
Campaign Name: It can be used for testing CTAs, conversions, landing pages, etc.
To get the most out of UTMs, you can even use them in your social comments to see what types of comments are getting the most conversions. It is also possible to check which groups, networks and profiles on social media get the most attention.
Using UTMs makes it easy to identify the best type of content and the most powerful platforms, so you can minimize ad spend and increase roi for content creation.
2. Tracking social media traffic and goals in Google Analytics
If we were told to use only one tool to track our social media traffic, we would choose Google Analytics. It's by far the best tool you can use to track your traffic sources and ROI, and understand user behavior.
You can find your most powerful content, social media platforms, conversions by device, and more. It's also possible to see how new visitors compare to old visitors to determine the engagement rates of recent social media campaigns.
After creating a Google Analytics account, setting up Google Tag Manager, and creating your Analytics tags, Google Analytics summarizes all social media traffic in its reports – especially under acquisition > social.
Within the Social Report, Google Analytics displays the results in a table that can be modified to show percentages, performance, pivot, comparisons, and other formats, allowing you to quickly analyze the data.
4 important social media reports
Some of the most important social media reports you can view are:
Overviews: provides an overall report on conversions
Conversions: Tracks conversions from specific platforms
Plugins: Tracks clicks on social media buttons for specific content
Network references: identifies the most powerful content on a particular platform
Another aspect of analytics that many new SEOs ignore is goal setting. However, you can only learn so much by observing the number of visits you receive. Instead, you can set specific goals that you can pursue and that provide the right context for business decisions.
Google Analytics Target Tracking
There are four types of goals you can pursue:
Objective: Tracks conversions from a specific source
Time used: Tracks the time spent on a particular page
Pages visited: measures the number of pages visited after the visitor lands on a landing page
Activity: Details of specific actions that traffic takes on a landing page
Setting the right goals with the right logic can help you get a better picture of the performance of your SEO and social media content strategies. For example, you can associate a conversion with a specific landing page by tracking visits to a specific landing page that is only accessible after a purchase is completed.
3. Optimization of the website's open graph protocol
Do you want to have full control over how your web pages are displayed when they are shared on social media? With the Open Graph Protocol, you can do just that. With this tool, you can ensure that only specially labeled images from your blog posts are displayed when they are shared on social platforms.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms support adding open graph tags, so you can decide which images to display when your content is shared. Just keep in mind that the images you add must have certain dimensions, otherwise any image from the post could be displayed in its place.
Facebook: 12000 x 630 pixels.
LinkedIn: 80 x 150 pixels.
Twitter: 300 X 157 pixels, less than 1 MB in size.
Aside from the image specifications, you need to consider some other open graph tag requirements to make sure you can control how posts are displayed on social media.
Title: Ideally, it should be between 60 and 90.
URL: To distinguish multiple URLs to the same landing page.
Type: To determine the type of content (articles, web pages, product pages, etc.)
Description: It is recommended to use up to 200 characters.
Author: To highlight the name of the author in the byline.
Audio: To identify audio files associated with your content.
Video: To tag video files related to your content.
4. Verification of the correct implementation of Twitter Cards
With a Twitter card, you can go beyond Twitter's 140-character limit and provide your audience with more content to engage with. All you have to do is insert a few lines of HTML code into your web page to make sure it's implemented correctly into the Twitter map.
You can add an image, video, or app and redirect your audience to a landing page using Twitter cards. You can also provide custom titles and descriptions and an enhanced mobile experience for your users.
You can hire a developer to add simple code to your website, or use WordPress plugins like JetPack and Yoast SEO to optimize your Twitter maps. Once this is done, let them run through the Twitter Card Validator. If you get errors, fix them before you publish your content to Twitter.
Run A/B tests to determine the best Twitter Cards. You can check the analytics of your Twitter Cards in the "Ads" section of your Twitter dashboard. And don't forget to add relevant CTAs to encourage your audience to click on your links so you can maximize traffic to your landing pages.
5. Use of trademarked short links to share content
It's important to use a link shortener to avoid the long and cluttered URLs we get after adding UTMs. Link shorteners are also a great way to track your traffic source, especially if you're running multiple campaigns. But why do you need to use branded short links?
A brand link is a shortened version of your original URL or brand name. Using a branded short link instead of a generic link will help improve your website's search engine optimization and keep your brand present with your audience, resulting in a higher level of awareness and trust.
A branded link consists of your domain name, the TLD, and the slug. To get branded short links, you must first register the perfect domain name, which can be a short form of your brand name. Here are some examples:
Pepsi - Pep.si
Disney - Di.sn
NY times - nyti.ms
Review the impact of social buttons on the performance of your website
Buttons for sharing content on social networks are a great way to make more people on social networks aware of your content. But where should you place your social networking buttons? Should you place them at the top or bottom of the post?
Here are some common social button placements:
Top: Just below the author line
Below: At the end of a post
Sticky Shares: Displayed horizontally so that your users can share the content at any point
To find out which solution works best for you, it's best to run A/B testing to make sure you're generating the most shares for your social buttons.
On the other hand, on some pages with a specific CTA, it may be a good idea to remove the social network buttons altogether to achieve a higher click-through rate for your call-to-action, thus creating an incentive to focus more on your message. Tell , a Finland-based hardware e-commerce retailer, was able to increase the click-through rate of its CTAs by almost 12% by removing social network buttons.
Pack
Although our main focus as SEOs is always on the search engines, we also need to make sure that we properly track and understand the data and traffic that comes to our websites.
Even though we are not directly responsible for social media, there is no denying that the presence of our website on these platforms can be a great advantage when it comes to gaining backlinks and visibility. By optimizing the technical aspects of social media, we can create a better attribution, better understand how the different channels affect our metrics, and make small changes that can make a big difference.
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