You’re probably familiar with search engine optimisation (SEO), but what about social media optimisation (SMO)? While it’s not as popular as SEO, SMO is about using social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and blogs to increase brand awareness.

It’s about creating and sharing content that’s tailored to your audience. It’s about engaging and entertaining your fans with content that they’ll want to share with their friends and followers. As more people see and interact with your content, your site gets more traffic and strong social signals, which increases your organic search visibility.

If you have a Facebook account or a blog, you’re probably already optimising your social media on a daily basis. Whether you’re deciding between using images versus videos for your updates, adding social sharing buttons to your blog posts or checking your analytics to see when your fans are most active and most likely to interact with your content – you’re optimising your social media marketing.

In this article we’ll be delving deeper into SMO and passing on some tips and advice that you can implement today to help increase both the visibility and reach of your social media posts.

Create and share irresistible content

If you want your fans and followers to engage with your content, you need to give them a reason. Provide insights and useful information, answer burning questions, raise interesting questions for them to answer, create a conversation or a debate, use humour and, above all, be human.

This not only helps your audience feel that connection that compels them to share your content, but it also shows them that you’re not just another brand, but one with a voice and a unique personality.

For your content to get noticed and shared, focus on visual content more as it performs much better on Facebook compared to text and links. Here’s an interesting infographic that shows how and why visual media is one of the most effective ways for brands to share their stories.

Share your content more than once

If you’ve written an insightful blog post or created a great infographic, don’t just fire off one tweet and forget about it. Every day, on average, around 500 million updates are shared on Twitter. That’s about 6,000 tweets every second. So, if you only tweet about it once, what do you think are the chances of your followers actually getting to see your content?

If you want to increase those chances, share your content more than once. But don’t share the same message over and over again. Be creative and diversify your message types to reach more people. This also allows you to test different messages and see how your audience reacts to each, which one gets more clicks, retweets, comments.

Here are some good ideas from KISSmetrics on how to implement this strategy well:

• Straight and easy:Post Title + Link
• The question:Ask an engaging question to stir conversation
• Cite a fact:Share a fact or figure that is included in your post
• Share a quote:Grab a pull-quote from your article and turn it into a social message
• Add intrigue:Write a teaser message that grabs the attention of your readers

Want more? Here are some other killer methods to promote blog content on social media.

When it comes to how many times you should share the same piece of content, that’s up to you. You can promote it once a day for two weeks, provided you also share other content in between. If you’re not very active on Twitter, then share it once every couple of days.

Write, repurpose, repeat

If one of your blog posts has received a lot of attention in the form of comments, likes, shares, retweets – take advantage and repurpose it. Gather some more facts and statistics and turn it into an infographic. Or create a video or a webinar using the ideas in your post as the foundation for your script, and then share it on Facebook, Vimeo or YouTube. You can even create quote graphics and share them on Instagram or Pinterest.

There are so many ways to work your blog content into your social media marketing. It’s up to you to come up with new ways that you can use the content on your blog to create additional content in different formats.

Want more ideas on how to repurpose your content? Check out our complete guide on repurposing content that includes ten clever ways to get more value out of our best content.

Focus on quality not quantity

There are tons of articles on the web that talk about how many times a day you should update your Facebook or Twitter to reach more people. While it’s good to get an idea of how often you should update your different social media accounts to engage more users, quantity shouldn’t be more important than quality.

It doesn’t matter that you’re sharing three updates a day on Facebook if the content you’re sharing is useless or boring. Instead, focus on creating and sharing content that you’re passionate about, content that informs, educates and entertains your audience. One quality post a day or every two days is better than poor quality content every day.

Make your content shareable

If you have a blog, you can’t be without social media plugins. They’re invaluable as they make it very easy for your readers to share your content at the click of a button. Think social sharing buttons that allow readers to share your content quickly, plugins that enable them to log in with their favourite social media account and leave a comment, a Click to Tweet plugin that makes it really easy for readers to share specific quotes and ideas from your posts and share them on Twitter.

These are just a few of the plugins that you can use to increase engagement and encourage readers to share your content. If you have a WordPress website, check out these 15 free social media plugins to turn your site into a social butterfly.

Your turn now

If you’re not yet making the most of social SEO to promote your business, now’s the time to start. And now that you know the ins and outs of SMO, there really is no excuse to implement these tips today.

Have any other advice on how to boost social SEO? We’d love to read your best tips so share them in a comment below.