Social Media Optimization (SMO), a relatively new term, uses social media to expand a company’s online presence and help achieve its goals. Digital Marketing Strategy, Social Media Optimization used for:
- Increase brand awareness, products and services
- Build relationships with current and potential clients.
- Drive traffic to your website
- Increase conversions, sales and increase sales
- And much more!
While search engine optimization, or SEO, is the most well-known process of increasing a website’s ranking in search results, SMO is a similar strategy that focuses on social profiles.
SMO is a great way to grow your digital presence through social media. A robust social media plan to connect with your target audience and drive conversions.
You can also build brand awareness, attract leads for your business, and engage with your audience more effectively. You can strengthen your social media presence with SMO.
Some Key Steps to Social Media Optimization
To optimize your social media channels, you need to create a social media optimization plan and then execute that plan. By following these five steps, you can achieve an optimized and effective social media presence through search.
Analyze your audience
As mentioned above, you need to choose the right platforms to focus on, and they should be the ones your audience uses the most. At this point, your goal is to figure out which social media platforms your audience is using and where they want it. You should also confirm your current social media engagement. Which channels are currently the most effective? Some may see good engagement, while others are driving a lot of direct traffic to their site.
Conduct a competitive analysis
The next step is to conduct a competitive analysis. You want to know how you stand out from the competition. What kind of social media activity do you see in front of them? What types of social content are working (or not) for your competitors? Or other industry leaders?
To do this, you can use the content viewer in your extended Alexa account. Enter competing sites into the Content Viewer to see which of your articles are getting the most attention.
Develop a results-based strategy
Once you understand your audience and feel the competition, it’s time to create a well-defined strategy that will help you achieve your goals. According to a business study by the MIT Sloan Management Review, strategy is one of the main obstacles to social enterprise.
Implement the strategy
Strategy is nothing without execution. The strategy is being implemented by the team, and SEO leaders and content marketers must work closely with the community and social media managers to bring this vision to life. Because social media optimization is very similar to search engine optimization. These groups must work together to achieve the same goal and ensure that the message is the same across all channels. When a brand posts to Instagram, it can direct followers to blog posts or detailed instructions if they need more information.
Analyze the results and make appropriate adjustments
Once the strategy has been implemented, it is necessary to analyze the results and make adjustments. In your initial strategy, describe how often you will check the results. This will prevent you from guessing when you will guess the right time.
Make sure you follow the 5 rules of SMO:
- Create content to share. This is so important for social media marketing, which is why in SMO it all comes down to identifying content that your audience loves to share across various social media platforms.
- Create favorable trading conditions. It is a combination of buttons and other widgets to encourage sharing, recommendation, or bookmarking on your website and blog. MOO is looking for the best places, formats and messages for this.
- Remuneration liabilities. Currently, “likes” or “tweets” are rewarded through promotions or a content reward, so you can see the best the program has to offer for that. This should lead to longer time frames to stimulate interaction and deeper conversations.
- Share content actively. This includes your process and format for off-center sharing. This may include distributing articles to other partners or platforms such as Slideshare or Scribd.
- Recommended mashups. This encourages people to use and mix your content to become user generated content. These activities can be effectively incorporated into campaigns.
Why is Social Media Optimization so Important?
1. Build a Strong Online Presence
With SMO, you can provide a strong online presence for your business and build brand trust online. It not only introduces people to the company but also helps build a brand, increase brand awareness and memorability.
2. Boost Your Reach
Social media optimization helps you reach the right audiences. This environment allows you to rate your customers on your terms. With mobile, video, and audio devices, your customers can communicate with you anytime, anywhere.
3. Drive More Traffic
Social media optimization is a huge source of traffic, social media channels allow you to reach customers all over the world, and no additional investment is required.
4. Lead Generation
While social media is particularly useful for branding and gaining attention, it is increasingly being used to generate leads. Using social media channels can dramatically improve lead generation campaigns.
5. Improves Search Engine Ranking
Synchronizing with search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts can also help improve search engine rankings. Ever since search engines began collecting data from social media channels like Google+ and displaying it in search results, SMO has become more popular among marketers.
To get the most out of social media, businesses need to update and share their content. The more content is transmitted, the better it is ranked in search engines. This will lead to a strong social media presence and increased website traffic.
7 Steps To improve Your SMO
Joshua Berg is one of the main defenders of SMO. You are promoting the seven-step REAL SMO model, which is:
- Reputation: Strengthens your reputation as a qualified source of trust
- Engagement: Fosters more interaction, exchange and reciprocity.
- Authority: The ability to become a visible authority in your area of expertise
- Leadership: That harnesses originality and creativity to become a thought leader.
- Social: Chat, find and interact with a sociable expert in your field.
- Media: Learn about your social media platforms to maximize impact.
- Optimization: Improved technical aspects to improve optimization.
These seven steps provide a good benchmark against which you can measure and plan your current SMO activities.