Anna is a co-founder of Adventure in You and has been traveling the world for the last 9 years. She has spent time living in Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia, and Spain and is our local expert in these areas. Her expertise on travel, gear, and building businesses have been featured on Foundr, Business Insider, Yahoo Travel, and more.
While most people focus on SEO (search engine optimization), sometimes, we all fail to maximize our own social media channels to help boost our blog rankings. Sure, we have a Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest….but is that enough?
The dictionary defines optimization as the act of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource.
In blog terms, optimization is the practice of making small tweaks to make sure that everything (including your social media profiles) are created in the best possible way to help drive your blog views and brand recognition. After all, that’s the whole point of social media right?
Here are a few tips to help you optimize your social media channels to help you get the best of these marketing platforms. Remember, your social media channels are the first thing the people see before your blog.
If your channels aren’t enticing enough…even if you’re the world’s best writer, they might not even get to your blog because your profile isn’t fully optimized! While some of these seem pretty simple, you would be surprised at how these little tweaks can massively affect your click-through rates.
Although most blogs have logos, unless you’re a HUGE company, try to keep your profile photo to a photo of you instead of your logo. Why? Because people love supporting other people. They want to be able to relate to you instead of a large brand which often feels impersonal.
Profile photos need to be a clear (high-quality) image of you which shows your face. If you don’t have one…go ahead and snap a few! Speaking from experience, when we changed our profile photos in our social media accounts back to our faces, our engagement rate went back up.
Good headshots are the key if you want to build a personal brand. If you’re representing a company though, a logo will work too!
Free Training: If you want to know how we exploded our traffic and got to 500,000 pageviews a month in just over 24 months, then you need to attend our Free Masterclass Training! Here, we share some of the biggest shifts which changed our business. It’s 100% free and is full of actional value bombs.
Create a Killer Profile with the Correct Social Media Image Size
Taking the time to make sure your social media cover photos are the correct size will help you avoid irregular weird looking crops. I recommend using Canva to help you create a fun social media cover photo.
They have built prebuilt templates that are already in the correct dimension and size. Also take note that although the profile photos are all different dimensions, if you crop them 1:1 they will all come out pretty unified.
Social Media Image Sizes 2018:
Facebook
Profile Photo: 180×180
Cover Photo: 820×310 (smartphones display as 640×360)
Sharing Image: 1200×630
Event Image:Â 1920 x 1080
Twitter
Profile Photo: 400 x 400
Header Photo:Â 1500 x 500
Instream Photo:Â 440 x 220
Instagram
Profile Image: 110×110 (image crop 1:1)
Image Dimensions:
Photo Size 1080×1080
Landscape 1080 x 566
Portrait 1080 x 1350
Pinterest
Profile:Â 165 x 165
Board Cover:Â 222 x 150
Pinterest Pin Size: 735×1102 (standard but can be longer)
(See Infographic Below)
Fill Out Your Information
One of the most important aspects of every social media profile is to make sure you’ve filled out all the necessary information.
Is it linked to your website? Do you have a cohesive about section which tells the readers who you are and what your blog is about? Also, make sure that you include important keywords that you want to rank for.
Write as much of your niche as you can and be clear about HOW your blog can help others. This will entice people that land on your profile channels to click through to your website. You would be surprised at how obscure some pages are with no information whatsoever about what the business (or blog) does.
Remember, it pays to be clear and catchy when it comes to your social media channels.
Find Your Optimal Post Time
Although it’s so easy to post things whenever you want to, finding optimal times to post can be very valuable. As you register your social media channels as business pages, these will come with built-in analytics reporting which will help you figure out the best times to post depending on your audience demographics.
We actually recently just switched to Instagram Business and was amazed at the analytics that comes with each post. So worth it! With that in mind, use the insights to find out when your audience is most active and play around with this until you find your ideal time.
In our Blogging Fastlane Course, we talk about the importance of creating goals and a clear strategy for each social media channel. The key is to figure out early on what works for your audience and really taking the time to grow that particular challenge. It is better to be really good at one channel over maintaining them all just for the sake of it.
Apart from the time of posting, you also need to play around with the language and type of posts that you do. Does video do better? Do statuses asking questions work? Do just photos with the link to the article in the comment sections seem to get better engagement?
Hopefully, this quick post has given you a clear idea on how to fully optimize your social media channels to maximize each one to help you reach your blogging goals.
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