What is Social Media Optimization ?
SMO is a process or a set of activities that helps you increase website traffic through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. A social media site is an online platform that allows us to interact with people and build social networks across the world. You can perform various tasks or activities through social media, e.g. you can participate in discussions, share your thoughts, create your page to promote your business etc.
Importance of Social Media Optimization
- It allows you use social media posts to drive targeted traffic.
- It allows you build a social network, interact with people and your customers. You can also read others’ tweets and status updates to get ideas about their interests, preferences and expectations.
- Social media ads allow you target and retarget as you can customize the social media ads. For example: you can target users of a particular location, education level and even on the basis of purchase history and pages they have liked.
- It allows you respond immediately to queries and problems of your customers related to your product or service. You can provide relevant information and resolve problems right away to satisfy your customers.
- It increases your brand loyalty, i.e. brands that are active on social media have more loyal customers.
- It provides you competitive edge. You can approach your potential customers first than your competitors. Today, more than 90% brands use more than one social media platform.
What actually we do in SMO:
First of all, we have to create social profiles for social media optimization.
Here is our step-by-step Social Media Optimization Tutorial.
1 – Find the Right network for you:
Focus on Social Media Platforms communities and groups where you are most likely to find your target audience.Google Plus, in this case, gives good results. Signup for Google +, Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook.
2 – Optimize your Social Media Profiles :
Use the same Username / Avatar across all your social media channels so people will recognise you and be able to recognize and communicate with you easily. – Treat your social media profiles the same way as your website. Profile should have information about your product / services in an interesting way using keywords for your areas of expertise. Follow specific optimization techniques in individual guides for Google +, Twitter, Pinterest.
3 – In Social Media Optimization Content is King:
Original content along with curated third party content makes a perfect recipe. See Creation vs Curation to decide the fine balance between the two.
4 – Proceed with Active Engagement Activities to acquire Likes, Shares, Plus Ones, Comments & Mentions.
5 – In Social Media Optimization Enable and encourage interaction with your Website / Blog Content:
Share buttons – make it easy for you target audience to share by adding share buttons to your content. To demonstrate social proof, show the numbers of shares
Social login – use social login options to make it easy for users to comment
Use Call to action – Encourage people to share or add comments. For eg. If you find this article useful please share it. In case you think I may have missed anything, do add your comments
6 – For Social Media Optimization Cross posting on Social Media Platforms:
Make your content pinnable. As soon as you publish your post, pin it to Pinterest. Share the Pinterest link on Google +, Facebook and Twitter.
Cross posting on Google + and Pinterest really works well. See How Google+ and Pinterest go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly.
Read also:Will Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Blogging Beginner Ever Rule the World?