Social media optimization can mean different things to different people. It could pertain to the content that you post, the ads that you run, or how to make your social media fit within your overall marketing strategy. Because of the importance of social media for businesses, influencers, or just active users, finding ways to optimize your profiles to improve your performance is vital.

In this article, we will discuss social media content best practices and how to use them to optimize what you post. In doing so, we will focus on how to optimize social media content across channels by showing you different ways you research past performance to come up with an overall social media optimization strategy.

It is important to note that social media content optimization involves gaining insights from data analysis. Therefore, throughout this article, we will reference the use of social media optimization tools and what types of insights and analyses they provide.

Developing your Social Media Optimization Strategy

When thinking about social media content optimization, it is important to develop a multifaceted strategy that helps you identity and improve different aspects of your content. By content, we don’t just mean the words you write, but also everything else that relates to the act of posting on social media. This can include researching hashtags, the best times to post, or any other type of analysis that helps you find what content is working the best and what is trending at a given time.    

When developing a social media optimization strategy, it is important to have a good understanding of core best practices and tips that help you effectively optimize your social media content. With this in mind, we will discuss 7 social media optimization techniques below. In presenting these social media optimization tips, we will highlight why these techniques can help you to optimize your content and what you should be aware of. 

As one final note, we should also point out that we will give a special focus as to how to optimize social media for businesses. For many businesses, social media offers an effective platform for marketing products or services. However, they may not know how to make it that their content is optimized to best succeed. In providing our social media optimization techniques, we will be using a social media tool to conduct advanced analysis that will show us how we can optimize our content. While there are many different social media optimization tools, in our examples below we will be using Fanpage Karma, an all-in-one social media tool that allows for unlimited profile tracking and analysis.

In discussing the different tips and techniques for social media content optimization below, we will be analyzing the social media profiles of 6 NBA teams (Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, Miami Heat, Chicago Bulls, Golden State Warriors, and New York Knicks). The goal will be to clearly illustrate how we can learn how to best optimize content by using the profiles of these 6 NBA teams as an example. The charts and graphs below are generated by the Fanpage Karma tool.

1. Conduct a Benchmarking Analysis

When thinking about social media optimization strategies, you should start out talking about your goals. But what goals are obtainable? And how do know what goals you should set? To answer these questions, you have to conduct a benchmarking analysis to see how your profiles compare to other similar profiles in your industry or that have a same target audiences. We have already written about how to conduct a benchmarking and competitor analysis in another article, but we will focus here on the importance of this for social media content optimization. 

A good social content optimization plan should be focused on specific goals among key metrics such as follower growth, engagement rate, etc. It is important to have a good idea about the averages for various metrics for your industry so you can accurately set your goals. One of the ways you can get a good overview of all these metrics is by using a metric chart. In the metric chart below, we look at the Instagram profiles for March 2024 for the six NBA teams. 

(6 NBA Teams March 2024, Instagram Profiles)

There are different aspects to consider in this regard, both in terms of the time frames that you choose to analyze and the metrics you deem the most important. Importantly, when you are looking for how to optimize social media profiles, it usually makes sense to look at social media networks individually. This means that instead of grouping all profiles for every single network together, a seperate benchmarking analysis should be conducted for each social network.

Naturally, you can use benchmarking analysis to get average engagement or post interaction rates for your industry and monitor how your profiles compare to others over time. Social media content optimization should start with knowing where your profiles stand, and where you want them to be.

2. Find the Most Successful Content Formats

You obviously what to create the best content for your social media marketing endeavors. This has a lot to do with the content you are posting, but can also be influenced by the content formats you use. For this reason, one way related to how to optimize social media content is to look at the best performing content formats for your industry. Below is a bar char that shows the post interaction rates associated with each content format across all profiles for all social media networks.

(6 NBA Teams March 2024, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube networks)

As you can see, for this time period, carousels have the highest average post interaction rate for posts. We should also point out that you can adjust graphs such as these to look at particular metrics, such as engagement rates or number of likes. This flexibility can help you find the content formats correspond with higher rates of a particular metric.  

Learning how to optimize social media content is in large part about making informed decisions based off of data. By looking at the performance of different content formats as they related to different metrics, you can see what formats you should post in more often. Moreover, instead of grouping together profiles on many social networks, you can restrict your analysis to content formats on only one network if you want to focus in on a particular network.

3. Discover the Best Times to Post

If you are trying to find out how to optimize social media posts, then discovering the best posting times is a great way to start. We have covered the general topic of finding the optimal posting times on social media before as well as walked through the steps of finding the best posting times for networks such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. We should stress that this is an important part of social media content optimization since posting times can help boost your overall engagement and post interaction rates. 

As we have mentioned in our articles about finding the best times to post, it is absolutely essential that you track similar profiles, and enough of them. When you are conducting content optimization for social media, you need to make sure your conclusions are data-based with a large enough data set. This is why unlimited profiles tracking is so important for a social media tool to have. 

Below is an example of analyzing the best times to post on TikTok for the NBA teams mentioned above for March 2024. The green circles are times that you consider posting since they indicate higher post interaction rates, while you should avoid the times that correspond with the red circles since these times correspond to lower post interaction rates.

(6 NBA Teams TikTok profiles, March 2024)

4. Research the Top-Performing Hashtags

Hashtags are used across social media networks and are an important part of any post. For this reason, an important part of a social media content optimization is to conduct hashtag research. We have covered the topic of hashtag research before, as well as how to find the best hashtags for various social media networks such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. However, in this section, we want to stress the importance of conducting hashtag research for two reasons.

The first reason relates to finding hashtags that correlate with higher post interaction rates in your industry. Some hashtags may be able to spur interactions more than others, and you can find these hashtags by analyzing the performance of your own profile as well as your competitors.   

The second reason as to why hashtag research is important for social media content optimization is that you can also see what types of topics are trending in your industry or among profiles that post content similar to yours. Hashtags are used in order to mark that a post relates to some topic or issue. If you know what hashtags are being used most often in your industry, then you have a better idea of what topics are important at a given time. 

Below is an example of how you can analyze hashtags with the Fanpage Karma tool. The green hashtags in the chart mean that those hashtags are correlated with a higher post interaction rate. This can be useful for finding what hashtags may help you generate interactions. The larger hashtags show that those hashtags are used more often and can help you discover what topics are trending.

(6 NBA Teams Twitter profiles, March 2024)

You should also note that there are free hashtag generators available that can help you quickly find suitable hashtags for your posts. These help you find hashtags to use that can help you increase reach and show the popularity of certain hashtags.

5. Undertake a Content Tagging Analysis

We have already talked about how to optimize social media posts in terms of content formats, but perhaps you want to focus more closely on the type of content that corresponds with post interaction or engagement rates. A tagging analysis is a great way to conduct a specific study on the qualities of social media posts and determine which ones perform better for a given metrics. 

You can read more how to set up a tagging analysis with Fanpage Karma, but we want to quickly discuss the reasons that you should consider this type of research. For instance, perhaps you are a social media manger for one of the NBA teams in our analysis and want to know if posts with images/videos showing fans react after big plays or players reacting after big plays get more interactions. In order to determine which type of content has the best performance, you could conduct a tagging analysis where you make two tags: “fan reactions” and “player reaction.” Once you created these two tags, you can simply use them to “tag” each post on a particular social network and time period that meets the criteria of one of the tags.

Once this is done, you can indicate what metric you want to measure for each post with a tag. You can choose to analyze interaction or engagement rate, or perhaps even the number of comments. Once this is finished, you can study to see which type of post performs the best.   

In order to optimize your social media content, don’t be afraid to spend some time and create various tags for your posts and then actually tag the posts that match the criteria of the tags you create.

6. Do your Keyword Research and Social Trends Analysis

What topics are trending in your industry and are there specific keywords that correspond to higher engagement rates? Finding the best content topics for social media marketing is, in part, about what people are looking for and creating posts that address those topics. There is, of course, the important topic of social SEO that we have written about earlier. However, social media keyword research can help you find not only what people are talking about, but also the post interaction rates associated with certain keywords.

As you see from the chart below, that is generated from the profiles in your data set, green words have higher average post interaction rates while larger words are used more often.

(6 NBA Teams Facebook profiles, March 2024)

However, we should also note that social media content optimization is not just about analyzing keywords. You should also use research functions that allow you to analyze trending topics and posts during a given time period that you can also filter by keyword, country, and/or language. This can be especially useful for businesses that post in multiple languages or international companies since they may want to focus on posts or topics that are trending in multiple countries.   

7. Don’t Forget Qualitative Analysis

At the end of the day, you probably want your social media tool to find the best posts for a specific social media network. A good approach to social media content optimization is to look closely at the best posts within your industry or among all the profiles you are tracking. One of the easiest ways to do with, with the Fanpage Karma social media tool at least, is to utilize their metric overview table for the top-performing posts. This allows you to get an overview of the various metrics associated with individuals posts. You also have the option to filter for various post types, keywords, or by individual metric.

(6 NBA Teams TikTok profiles, March 2024)

If you want a more extensive view of top posts for your social media content optimization strategy, you can also look at a metric table with the top 20, 100, or 1000 posts. You can also filter the results to look at the top posts for a specific metric. 

You can also look at different list views of a Top 10 (or Flop 10 if you want to see the worst performing posts) by content type as well. You can set these tables to show metrics such as engagement, post interaction rate, or even the number of likes. In this way, it gives you a quick overview of the type of content that is performing so you can better look for trends or best practices yourself. Here you see the Top 10 Instagram posts in terms of post interaction rate for the 6 NBA teams. 

(6 NBA Teams Instagram profiles, March 2024)

Social Media Content Optimization Strategies

If you want to be successful on any social media channel, you have to work hard while also doing your research. The content optimization steps you can take when it comes to your social media profiles can help boost performance and grow your followers. You can use one or all of these techniques within your overall social media strategy in order to improve the performance of your content. 

It is important that you find the right social media optimization tool that meets your needs. If you are looking for a social media tool that gives you advanced analytical features as well as unlimited profile tracking, then try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial. This all-in-one social media tool offers a wide range of features such as benchmarking, research, publishing, and community management.

You can also attend the free weekly webinars that Fanpage Karma offers.