I put this together for college for an online journalism class with limited funding,thought it would be good to share here. It just highlights some of the simple things you can do for free to optimize your businesses social media to push more traffic to your main business website.

Why Facebook is important for your social media presence 
One key selling point as to why Facebook is important for our social media strategy for thecity.ie is Facebook’s large-scale reach with over with 2.41 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2019, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. As a “business”, it’s important to set up and maintain a Facebook Page as a means to connect with our audience and deliver our business objectives ← Get more user engagement on our social media platforms and  traffic to our website. Facebook Page posts are a way to generate engagement with  target audiences by sharing news, announcements, tips, contests, events, stories, etc. Published Page Posts can be strategically targeted both organically through the free post composer and via Facebook ads to gain greater distribution.  

How to Optimize Facebook posts to move our audience to our website:

Highly engaged Facebook posts typically are succinct. 

Attention spans are shorter than ever, so it’s important to make your point and make it quickly — This is a good story GO TO OUR WEBSITE. 

Additionally, being topical and relevant is key to engaging your audience in the most impactful way. Make it clear what you want them to do with the information you’re sharing, so be sure to include an explicit call-to-action (CTA) to get the most out of your post.  We want their eyes on our website, we want our audience to engage with our posts that means Likes, Shares and  Comments. More engagement means eyes which means more optimization which moves traffic to our website.  

Lastly, including rich media in your post is imperative in order to be seen in user’s cluttered News Feed environment. Posts lacking photo or video can easily get lost in a scroll, and Facebook’s algorithm is also optimized to showcase posts that include native photo and video content ( Stock images found on Google means posts won’t be optimized). 

How to make your page more optimizable:

Facebook is all about proper engagement from people, such as comments and shares on Messenger.

• Comments and likes on a person’s status of photo
• Engagement with publisher content posted by friends
• Shares on Messenger
• Replies to comments on a video
• Who posted the content
• When was it posted
• What time is it now
• Technology (what type of phone, how strong the internet connection is)
• Content type
• Average time spent on content
• How informative the post is
• Completeness of a profile

Click here for source from information from above

Best Page posts to move traffic towards your website:

These are the types of link posts available through Facebook:

Source:https://www.qwaya.com/facebook-ads/guide-to-facebook-ads

The city.ie three best type of posts to implement from those eight:

Link Posts:

Link Posts are simply posts that link to a website off of the Facebook platform. 

The issue with this link is that it moves the user off of our platform onto Youtube rather than to our website.  The main goal is to get as many eyes as possible to the main website https://thecity.ie/.

Photo Posts:

Capture your audience’s attention and tell a story with photos. Photo Posts can be with or without text and include an image, of course.

Photography makes a difference to engagement because Facebook wants meaningful social interaction. 

Video Posts: 

Video Posts include a native video uploaded directly to Facebook rather than posting a link to a video from a third party site. A video link offsite would be considered a link post. (Refer to link post above).

Key take-aways:

• Have call to actions on all our posts i.e read this story here, go here to read more etc…
  
• Social media acts as a way to imbue professionalism as it acts as the first port of call before users move towards our website
  
• Optimize our Facebook to reach a larger audience — is our facebook profile completed, quality photos over stock images etc…

Optimizing Youtube:
Youtube would be the social media that shouldn’t be focused on too much. While videos will be posted there it is one of the weaker social media presence.  To best optimize the Youtube account it is important to recognize that it hasn’t been updated in terms of the profile image (see below). 

Videos don’t link back to the main website thecity.ie which is the most important CTA (see below).  I understand that this has nothing to do with the students from the class, hence why it should be recognised that the Youtube page would get the least amount of strategy. The Youtube profile can be improved by simple things such as hashtags, CTA’s such as LIKE,SHARE,SUBSCRIBE for the Youtube channel.

Best metadata practices:

1. Video title – provide a title that will encourage users to click or watch the video.

2. Video description – accurately describe the content of the video that a user is about to watch.

3. Tags – add keywords to your video that can be found in YouTube search.

Key Take-away:
Metadata enhances the discover-ability of your videos and tells the system about your content. It is also the same metadata you will later rely on to effectively target your advertising, so it is best practice among all content creators to complete this step.

Categories: #marketing

Tags: #blogger, #college, #digitalmarketing, #marketing, #optimization