“Sharing your best content when none of your followers are online to see it is just as useless as throwing spam to a crowd of followers” – Mitch Monsen

Social media optimization is great for at least 2 things: one is the increased Google interest in taking into account social signs as ranking factors (this is at least what Mitch Monsen, CEO/Head Consultant at WhiteFireSEO,claims), and second SMO helps you in getting your company/product engaged with your customers, helping them to better understand you as well as helping you to better understand your customers. Thus, the main goal of today’s blog post is to answer to 3 questions in the context of SMO and those are: Where?, What? and When? Most probably you have asked yourself where is the best place on your web site to include your social media buttons, what social profile information is most effective when it comes to SMO and last but not the least, when is the right moment to publish your content or updates. Logically there is no one correct answer to each of these questions. It depends on particular case. For that reason you need to test before you find the correct answer for your case. Nevertheless, let’s see how you can find the answers to these questions.

1. Where?- The place where you will include the social buttons is very important. Why? In his great blog post, “How to Increase Traffic with Social A/B Testing”, Monsen suggests that social buttons should be viewed as CTA (Call to Action) buttons (Follow this link to learn more about CTA examples and best practices). He says that one should care about the place social buttons show up “for the same reason you care where you place your buy button on your landing pages; optimal button placement leads to higher conversions, whether the conversion in question is a fresh share of your blog content or product page, or a new Facebook Fan or LinkedIn group member”.

What to do? First, don’t place too many social buttons. In one of our previous posts, “Customer Choice: The more you give the less you get”, we were talking about the rationale behind this statement. Second, try to identify the most visible places on your website. Where do readers keep their eye on mostly? The way you could find this out is of course through testing and following readers’ actions. Monsen suggests services such as CrazyEgg as a possible way to find out the place your readers click mostly. He says that once you figure this out, you should place your social buttons accordingly and run another click map in order to find out if you are on the right track, which means if the buttons convert well. Monsen advises that the places which seem to be good for social buttons on your blog posts are not necessarily the right places for your product page too. Thus you need to do the testing once again. Moreover try to experiment. Try top left corner, top right corner, both top left/right and bottom/left right corner. Try to put the buttons on a scrolling sidebar. Experiment until you think you managed to achieve the greatest conversion. Mark Suster’s blog, TechCrunch, KISSMetrics blog, or Mashable are some good examples you could take a look at.

2. What? - Profile information: photo, bio, and description are said to be critical in attracting followers/friends/connections. Why? Because a strong bio, correct keywords in your description, and easily identifiable interests that are listed on your profile will help you to rank higher in search engines. Thus, this info is not important because of introducing yourself to the public only, but it is important because of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) too. “Several social tools making their way onto the scene are mining your profile to find topics you’re influential on, for example, Followerwonk. Examples of people who have increased their fans or followers abound. Rand Fishkin, well-known co-founder of SEOmoz, increased his Twitter follower accrual rate by just changing his profile picture”, explains Monsen.

What to do? It’s again about testing. As Monsen advises, build your profile (photo, bio, description) while having in mind some keywords and interests that are relevant for your target readers. Next, observe your profile performance for 2 weeks and then make some change: photo, logo, keywords, etc, then monitor again, compare and repeat the process. Over time you will figure out what works the best for you. Follow this link to read about some basic tips on Google+ profile optimization, this link is about Facebook profile optimization, this link is about Twitter profile optimization, and this link is about Linkedin profile maximization.

3. When?- Last but not the least, you need to find the answer to the following question: when is the right moment to share your content or updates? This is maybe even the most important question because you might have done everything right, place the right social buttons on the right place, optimize your profile but all of these would basically be useless if your target readers do not get to this info. So saying in the right moment is as important as what you are saying.

What to do? When it comes to this, the best way to test it is by using some great online tools which will first tell you when your followers/friends/connections are online, and some of them could even post your content or updates according to your friends/followers online presence and activity. So basically you submit the post, the app schedules it, you tell the app the number of times you want that post to be published and the app does this for you. The great thing about these tools is that they learn overtime and logically they adjust the publishing time according to that. In this way you can achieve great online outreach. Monsen recommends Tweriod and Crowdbooster to find out when your followers are online and tweet accordingly. And Timely and Buffer to schedule updates. If you want to find out more about other metrics like share conversion based on update/share length or number of words then read Fishkin’s blog post “Calculating and Improving Your Twitter Clickthrough Rate”.

To sum up: identify the right spot on your website that you believe is the best for your social buttons to be placed, build your profile in a way that you will attract more followers, and test until you figure out the best timing for sharing your updates. All these activities might take some time, but once you figure it out you will surely achieve great web site traffic and eventually higher rankings in search engines. Good luck and if you use any other optimization tactics we missed in this blog post please let us know in the comments section.

“To be a cool kid, you have to be friends with cool kids, but don’t forget about your real friends” – Neil Patel