Welcome to Spill the TEA with Kenzie! A blog series focused on social media tips and best practices to help Marketing TEA clients and connections learn how to utilize different social platforms successfully for their businesses. These thoughts will all be coming from me, Kenzie, the Writing and Photo Production Manager here at Marketing TEA, as well as the Co-Host of Marketing TEA’s Socially Unstable Podcast. I am a social media enthusiast with a verifiable track record of creating engaging and strategic content for social channels, and I am excited to share it all with you. Now, let’s dive right in!

Running a business and making sure everything is operating smoothly takes up a lot of time, so I understand that focusing on optimizing your social media profiles might not be at the top of the priority list. However, what if I told you that I could help you optimize your social media profiles and in turn help your business flourish in less than an hour? Sounds like a good deal, right? These are very tangible tips that you can put into action with little work. But before I dive in, let me tell you why optimizing your profiles are important.

Optimizing your social media profiles benefits your business in multiple ways like increasing visibility, generating relevant leads, and improving your numbers on all fronts. Social Media Optimization is all about strategically creating and maximizing your social media plan in order to achieve your marketing goals. When your profiles are fully optimized, social media algorithms place your pages in front of more eyes, increase your authority, and give your organic engagement a BIG boost. These are things you should be striving for on social media in order to reach your marketing/business objectives.

Now it’s time to put these tips into action so you can crush your 2020 marketing goals!

Tip #1: Alt Text

I am starting with alt text because you will want to make sure you are doing this with the following tips as well since they have to do with photos. Alt text stands for alternative text and is the description you add to a photo in order for Google and other platforms to rank them. You should be adding alt text to every image you upload!

Tip #2: Profile + Cover Photo

Your profile photos on all social media accounts should match (or at least be in the same theme). If you are a brand or a business, you will typically want your image to be your logo so it is easily recognizable to your clients/followers. If you are the main part of your brand or an entrepreneur, then a headshot might be an appropriate option.

You will also want to make sure your cover photo is branded. This can take a few different paths. You could do a mash up video of you working, a theme for the current season or make it an advertisement for certain products. The cover photo is usually the first thing a person will see. If it’s good it will draw them in and keep them on your profile.

An important part of this step is to make sure you are using the right photo dimensions for each platform. They all vary so it does take a little more time to resize your images, but it is key! How many times have you visited a profile and the image looks pixelated or very small, so you instantly leave? You want to establish yourself as an expert, so producing high quality content consistently is a must. You can find a list of all of the recommended sizes here.

Tip #3: Username

Make sure your username/handles are consistent across all platforms. This helps increase brand recognition and helps people find you when they are looking on Facebook and then decide to hop over to Instagram or LinkedIn. It isn’t always possible, but I would keep the first part of the name the same. For example, Marketing TEA’s handles on all platforms begin with @MarketingTEA, but since that was not available on all platforms when we set them up, our Facebook page is actually @MarketingTEABrand. Just do the best you can to make this simple and easy to find. 

Tip #4: Name

For Instagram specifically, the ‘name’ section is also optimizable. When people are searching for you in the search bar, both the username and the ‘name’ of your profile pop up. This is great because if you can’t get the username you wanted you can put your business name in the ‘name’ section, and it will populate. If people know your business mostly because of you and you think they will be typing in your name to find your page you will want to put your full name there instead.

Tip #5: Fill Out Every Profile Field

Every single field is important, whether it is your phone number, description of your business, or photo albums! I like to start with Facebook because there are the most sections to fill out. I like to click on each section listed on the left-hand side of your page (services, events, reviews, shop, offers, photos, etc.) and make my way down the list so I don’t forget anything! Then you can take all of that information and copy and paste it into your other profiles.

Use keywords when filling out your profiles. Keywords are words that will help you get discovered for your particular business, industry, or niche. Using Marketing TEA as an example, we would want to make sure we are using words like “content creation”, “marketing strategies”, “content marketing”, and “brand development” consistently throughout each profile.

Another step to include is making sure you are cross promoting all of your profiles. Always link back to your website and other profiles as much as possible so that your audience can easily maneuver around all of your accounts.

Optimizing your social media profiles can be quick and easy, but the reward is HUGE. The more people that see your content and trust your brand, the more clients you have the opportunity to gain, and the more your business grows. These tips are a great place to start with optimizing your social media profiles, but the truth is that there is so much more you can do to leverage your business’s reach! At Marketing TEA, we can help take your digital marketing to the next level. It’s time to have a chat with us.

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