Marketing

3 Ways to Streamline Your Social Media Optimization

June 30, 2014

Social media is a core component of any modern marketing strategy, and in order to succeed you need to be two things: extremely targeted and incredibly efficient. OpenView Content Marketing Specialist Morgan Burke shares three best practices for achieving both.

 
Social media is no longer optional. We now know just how much social can do for a company — from increasing sales to crowd funding and launch. What most companies do not yet know is how to keep their social strategy efficient while staying targeted.
Social Media Optimization (affectionately SMO) matters because there are so many ways for people to view your content; without a targeted approach it is likely that you will be just another voice in the crowd, SMO allows you to keep your targeted strategy without devoting an inappropriate amount of time to one channel.

3 Ways to Streamline Your Social Media Optimization

1) Know The Role of Each Platform

 
Here at OpenView, we have a firm grasp on the role our different social channels. For example, LinkedIn is where we share startup news, portfolio news, and big content that will resonate with our overall startup audience. Sales and Marketing content does well on LinkedIn as well, but usually via specified groups. Lifestyle marketing content, on the other hand, doesn’t usually resonate here.
While this might seem too granular, knowing what content performs the best and where keeps us from wasting our time promoting or producing content that just simply doesn’t resonate with our audiences.

2) Streamline Scheduling to Make Room for Engagement

Scheduling out content in advance is another great way to streamline efficiency without diluting your strategy. There’s a time and a place for tweeting and sharing live, but what doesn’t need to be done live should be put aside for scheduling.
Here are a few ways you can minimize your time looking for and scheduling out targeted content:

  • Pick the best content from last week/month and schedule it out with different messaging.
  • Spend two solid hours at the beginning of the week and schedule in-house posts for the next few months.
  • Instead of scrambling for new outside content to post every day, devote another hour to scheduling evergreen content from your top publications. These are timeless posts that hit upon major drumbeats or pain points for your audience.

Scheduling your content ahead of time will help prevent a morning scramble that eats valuable time and prevents live engagement.

3) Use External Content Aggregators

One of the key components of a winning social strategy is sharing external content that resonates with your target audience, but curating quality content can steal hours of time. Here are 2 tools for curating content:
Feedly:

Screen shot 2014-06-30 at 1.35.10 PM

Every good content marketer should use Feedly to aggregate the publications or topics they frequent. For the type A list-making junkies (and those of us still recovering from the loss of Google Reader), it doesn’t get much better than this. A pretty interface, easily customizable lists, aggregation by topics, and their subscribe button make it easy to find recent and evergreen content on the topics our various audiences care about the most.

Twitter Lists:

A targeted Twitter list helps you aggregate people or companies who are sharing relevant content. Private or public, the more targeted the list the more it will do for you. The big time-saver is in the scroll. Instead of scrolling through an infinite land of steam of conscious ticker-tape, you can, with the click of a button, know what your relevant influencers on any given topic are talking about right now.

What are your tips and tricks with it comes to your SMO?

 
Photo by: Orange Robot

Chief Marketing Office

<strong>Morgan Burke</strong> is Chief Marketing Officer at <a href="https://greenpinatatoys.com/">Green Pinata</a>. She previously worked on OpenView's marketing team.