Apr 1 2025
Social media optimization with Yoast SEO

Are you tired of your social media efforts not achieving the results you hoped for? It might be time to scale up your social media optimization efforts. Your content might be good, but you could do various enhancements to make it stand out. For instance, your content needs proper metadata for X, Facebook, and the like to appear properly on each platform. Yoast SEO can help you do this quickly.

Table of contents

Sharing your freshly written (or optimized) content on social media is important. It helps you stay in touch with your audience and update them on news about your business and related topics. But to get their attention, you need to optimize your social media posts before you share them.

In this article, we’ll explain how you can optimize your posts for Facebook and X, and how our plugin can help you with that! Lastly, we’ll briefly discuss Pinterest and the use of Rich Pins.

Social media optimization is about improving how you use social media platforms to build your online presence. You do this not only by creating and sharing content for every platform you’d like to be active on but also by optimizing that content in such a way that you get traffic to your site. The goal is to build strong connections with your audience and to keep them engaged.

Social media optimization starts with well-optimized, highly relevant content that grabs attention. For most platforms, images and video are best suited for this. You can test various formats and ideas to see what your audience prefers. You can use any of the social media analytics tools to do this. Also, find the best times to publish your content to get the best engagement. Your posts should also have metadata for specific platforms like X Cards or OpenGraph for Facebook to help these platforms understand your content.

After posting, remember to engage with your audience. Respond to comments, participate in discussions, and listen to what people say about you and your content. Track your best-performing posts and use data to improve your content to stay relevant and engaging.

Promoting your content on various platforms makes sense in most cases. Remember to share your articles, videos, and other content on whatever social media network makes sense for you and your audience. Read this article if you don’t know where to begin with your social media strategy.

Facebook and other social media

Years ago, Facebook introduced OpenGraph to determine which elements of your page you want to show when someone shares that page. Several social networks and search engines use Facebook’s OpenGraph, but the main reason for adding it is for Facebook itself. Facebook’s OpenGraph support is continuously evolving, but the basics are simple. With a few pieces of metadata, you declare:

  • What type of content is this?
  • What’s the locale?
  • What’s the canonical URL of the page?
  • What’s the name of the site and the title of the page?
  • What’s the page about?
  • Which image/images should be shown when this post or page is shared on Facebook?

Social media preview in Yoast SEO

When you use Yoast SEO, most of the values above are filled out automatically based on your post’s data. It uses the locale of your site, the site’s name, SEO title, the canonical, the meta description value, etc, to fill out most of the required OpenGraph tags. You can see what your post will look like when you click on ‘Social media appearance’ in the Yoast SEO sidebar:

You’ll notice the Social media appearance button in the sidebar opening the modal for the feature

This preview tab allows you to edit how your Facebook post is shown when shared. Our plugin lets you change your social image, title, and description in your preview. This makes your social media optimization much quicker and easier, as you won’t have to leave your post to make these changes.

Make more impact on social media with Yoast SEO Premium!

Get Yoast SEO Premium today and make it quick and easy to manage how your social media snippets look.

If you use the options for social media optimization in Yoast SEO, your Facebook post could look like this when you share the URL of a post or page:

Example of a Facebook post as seen on Yoast’s profile

So what do you need to do?

  1. First, go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Site representation, and fill in your social media accounts.
  2. Afterward, go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Social sharing, and make sure OpenGraph is enabled.
  3. Then, set a good default image under the site basics settings. This image is used when you have a post or page that does not contain an image. It’s important to set this image to ensure that every post or page has an image when shared. Facebook is forgiving when uploading images, but 1200px by 630px should work well.
  4. Lastly, follow the steps in this article to go to your personal WordPress profile and add a link to your Facebook profile, if you want to associate your Facebook profile with your content. If you do, be sure to also enable the ‘Follow’ functionality on Facebook.

You can complete all of these steps in a few minutes. After that, Yoast SEO takes all of the work out of your hands. However, it is important to remember that Facebook sometimes doesn’t immediately pick up changes. So, if you want to “debug” how Facebook perceives your page, enter your URL in the Facebook Sharing Debugger and click the Debug button. If the preview that you see there isn’t the latest version, you can try the Scrape again button. But remember that it can take a while for Facebook to see your changes.

OpenGraph for Video Content

If you have video content, you must do more work unless you use our Video SEO plugin. This plugin handles all the needed metadata and lets you share your videos on Facebook.

X

X’s functionality is quite similar to Facebook’s. The name of this functionality is X Cards. X “falls back” on Facebook OpenGraph for several of these values, so we don’t have to include everything. But it still is quite a bit. We’re talking about:

  • the type of content/type of card
  • an image
  • a description
  • the X account of the site/publisher
  • the X account of the author
  • the “name” for the domain to show in an X card

X preview in Yoast SEO

As you might have seen in Yoast SEO, optimizing your X listings is also an option. Simply click that tab to preview how your page appears when it gets shared to X. By default, the plugin uses the title, description and image you enter in the search appearance preview. Of course, this tab allows you to change these for your Twitter post.

Here’s an example of what your post could look like with all the required metadata our plugin helps you add:

An example of a post on Yoast’s X profile

So what do you need to do?

Ensure X card metadata is enabled by going to Yoast SEO → Settings → Site features → Social sharing and activating the X feature. This leaves a couple of values for you to fill out in the settings, which you can do using this guide on activating X Cards in Yoast SEO.

Do you spend a lot of time tweaking the preview appearance of each page or post? You’ll be glad to know that Yoast SEO Premium also offers a very helpful feature: the ability to set default templates for your social snippets. With this powerful feature, you can design the ideal social appearance for all your content and feel certain that the output will always look great to whoever is sharing it.

Use variables to set up templates to optimize your social media postings

What about Pinterest?

Pinterest’s Rich Pins allow for OpenGraph markup as well. Add variables like product name, availability, price, and currency to your page to create a rich pin. As this is mainly interesting for products, we decided to add functionalities to create rich pins to our Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin.

Read more: How to promote your products and earn money on Pinterest »

Conclusion on social media optimization

So, go ahead and use Yoast SEO to optimize your social media. It isn’t very hard; it just takes a few minutes of your time, and you will reap the rewards immediately. As these social networks add new features, we’ll keep our plugin and this article up-to-date. So, be sure to update the Yoast SEO plugin regularly.

Keep reading: Social Media Strategy: where to begin? »

Avatar of Edwin Toonen


Edwin Toonen

Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Aug 20 2024
Social media ads vs. organic strategy: which is better for SEO?

Even if you’re a new or experienced business owner, you can’t ignore the impact of social media on your business. It’s great for marketing, brand awareness, and SEO. But it’s quite a hassle to keep track of your social media accounts, website, blog, and your product(s). To save you time and money, we’ll be looking at what benefits your SEO the most: an organic social media strategy or using social media ads?

First, what is an organic social media strategy? Well, it’s the opposite of using social media ads—something you have to pay for. An organic strategy means you use free/unpaid methods of creating and sharing content on social media platforms to build an engaged audience. 

In other words, you regularly post high-quality content on your social media accounts. Plus, another important part of an organic strategy is engaging with your audience through, for example, comments.

Long-term benefits

There are a lot of long-term benefits from having an organic strategy. If you post consistently for a long time, you’ll usually get sustained engagement and traffic from your posts. Which, in turn, can lead to higher search engine rankings.

Authenticity and engagement

Another benefit is the authenticity of your content—which is becoming increasingly more important nowadays. People want to know if they can trust your brand. By regularly posting authentic content and engaging with your audience, you’ll be able to boost your brand reputation and indirectly boost your SEO.

So how does engagement boost your SEO? Well, likes, shares, and comments can influence your SEO by signaling that your content is relevant and popular. Plus, now that Google shows social media content in their search results more often, it can only be a good thing to have great engagement metrics.

The disadvantages of organic social media

It takes some time

To see the benefits of an organic social media strategy, you have to post consistently over a long period of time. This can also be a disadvantage, however. Sometimes you want to launch a new brand or product, and you don’t want to post about it for months before you catch people’s attention.

Even though you do get results with an organic strategy, it can take months to see significant results. So you need to have patience!

Consistency is important

It’s a key component, in fact. For an effective organic strategy, you need to continuously and consistently put in the effort to maintain your brand’s visibility and engagement. This means you need to stay on top of your feed and regularly brainstorm what might be interesting content for your audience. Which does take time and effort.

What are social media ads?

Social media ads are pretty straightforward. They’re paid advertisements that you can run on social media platforms like Meta (which includes Facebook and Instagram), X and YouTube. It’s also good to know that there are various advertisement types, such as display ads, video ads, sponsored posts, etc. Depending on your goal and audience, you choose one of these.

Example of display ad

As we just mentioned, social media ads are paid advertisements. The costs, however, can vary, depending on your audience, the type of ad, and the duration of your campaign. That’s why some campaigns might be more expensive than others!

An example of a sponsored post on Instagram from the company Emma. It announces the summer sale and shows a bed.
Example of sponsored post

The SEO advantages of paid social media

Quick results

As opposed to an organic strategy, ads can generate immediate traffic and engagement to your site. This could indirectly improve your SEO because your engagement metrics will increase. 

Plus, if you’re promoting high-quality content, then people are more likely to share it, like it, and link to it. Which is all very valuable for your SEO. 

Reach your target audience

Ads also make it relatively easy to reach your target audience. When you set up an ad, you can fill in precise information that will allow you to reach people from a certain demographic, with certain interests and behaviors. 

If those people like the content you’ve boosted, they might even follow your account. That would be the ideal situation, since they will now also see your organic posts.

The disadvantages of paid social media

Costs

This is a no-brainer since it’s in the name, but it’s still worth mentioning. Paying for ads can get quite expensive. Especially if this is your social media strategy, and you don’t have an organic strategy. 

If that’s the case, you’ll have to continuously invest in social media ads to maintain your brand’s visibility.

Short-term impact

Ads only run for a limited time. If your campaign is over and your ad isn’t promoted anymore, then your traffic and engagement from that ad will drop. In other words, there are no lasting SEO benefits from paid ads.

Ad fatigue

Yep, it’s a thing! Seeing an ad too often can desensitize people. In other words: people get bored from seeing the same ad and they stop paying attention. Which means your ad will become less effective. Have you ever seen a TV ad so many times that you get tired of it? It’s the same thing. Ad fatigue.

Overall impact on SEO: organic versus paid

We’ve talked about the SEO advantages to both strategies, but let’s briefly summarize.

  • Having an organic social media strategy means you regularly post high-quality content, which can lead to more backlinks and improved brand visibility. It might even improve your engagement metrics!
  • Using paid ads will not directly influence your SEO ranking. However, ads can drive significant traffic to your site, which in turn can improve metrics like pages per session.
A visual with two blocks. The left block is titled organic strategy. It reads: Regularly posting high-quality content can lead to more backlinks and improved brand visibility. It might even improve your engagement metrics! The right block is titled paid ads. It reads: Paid ads don't directly influence SEO rankings, but they can drive significant traffic to your site. This can improve metrics like pages per session.

Which strategy is better?

As always, the answer fully depends on your goals and how much you’re willing to invest into your social media strategy, be it time or money or both. To maximize the impact of your social media on your SEO however, we would recommend using both strategies. 

Why? Because you can use ads to boost new or high-value content to reach your target audience. Once the initial buzz of an ad has died down, you can keep people interested with your organic posts. 

Tip: utilize analytics

Most social media platforms offer you insight into the performance of your organic and paid posts. Use this to check which posts are resonating with your audience and which aren’t. If you combine this data with your website’s analytics, you’ll be able to easily adjust your strategy, so you can focus on what works best.

Conclusion

Both organic and paid strategies have their advantages. An organic social media strategy will result in slow and steady growth with lasting benefits for your business. However, this will take a lot of time before you see any results. On the other hand, using paid ads will give you quick results and allows you to target the exact audience that you want to reach. But paid ads can get expensive, so they might be more useful for immediate traffic boosts or announcing a new product or service to your audience.

That’s why it might be in your best interest to combine both, so you’ll have the benefits of building a connection with your audience while also boosting your growth with paid ads.

Read more: Are social media platforms becoming the new search engines? »

Sabrina Joest

Sabrina is the Social Media Specialist at Yoast. She’s responsible for creating and curating engaging content to enhance Yoasts’ brand presence across various social platforms.

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Coming up next!

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