Online marketing is all about awareness and visibility. Most of the time, people find your small business online in one of three ways:
- Your company comes up early in search engine results,
- You’re mentioned or recommended by another person or website they visit, or
- They already know about your company and go looking for you
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies with the broad goal of bringing more people to your website the first way, by improving your search engine rankings. Social media optimization (SMO) can be one part of SEO—but it also contributes to all three ways people find you online.
SMO is the most important part of Digital marketing.
Why SMO ?
- SMO was originally designed to drive traffic from social media sites such as bookmarking sites and social networks.
- However, SMO is now significantly more important and not simply because social networking has grown but because SMO also improves SEO performance.
- Good SMO will drive traffic from both direct social site referrals and from search engines.
- Working with SMO can help you strengthen your brand and boost visibility, as well as generate leads and increase sales.
- Optimizing your social media builds both familiarity with and trust for your business, because consumers will see you not only mentioned, but recommended by others.
As outlined in Wikipedia -
The core purpose of SMO : SMO is similar to search engine optimization in that the goal is to generate traffic and awareness for a website.
In general, social media optimization refers to optimizing a website and its content in terms of sharing across social media and networking sites.
Easy & Basics Steps to Improve your SMO
If you want to improve SMO, then I would recommend you the following easy steps which provide a good benchmark against which you can assess and plan your current SMO activity.
1. Reputation
- Reputation is also about how you engage and support people.
- Undertaking thorough research and producing original content or present quality content. This will make you a respected and qualified source.
- Your reputation will be enhanced if you openly share your content and expertise including content that is not your own, engage with others through discussions and commenting, and if you are friendly and helpful to people.
2. Engagement
- Actively engage with your audience. This can include commenting, mentions, shares, likes, and plus ones.
- No one is as smart as everyone so share other peoples' content and provide a good user experience by providing feedback and comments.
- You need to target the networks with which to interact and make it easy for people to interact.
- Asking users to create accounts on your site will discourage users from commenting so use existing social logins such as LinkedIn or tools such as Disqus.
- You can also encourage people to engage with a call to action, for example if you find this article helpful please share it. If you think I have missed anything please add your comments below.
3. Authority
There are many aspects to authority.
- Search engines are interested in ascertaining what individuals and brands are seen as authoritative and trusted by real people on the Internet. The most obvious example of a move in this direction is Google Authorship.
- Setting up Google Authorship can help establish you as an expert and show your profile prominently in search results.
- You can also enhance your authority and the value of content through social proof. In essence the more your content is shared through plus ones, retweets, bookmarks or likes the more it indicates the value and usefulness of your content. It may also encourage others to read your content.
4. Leadership
- To me leadership is about high quality research, thinking and original content production.
- A leader will research everything they can about their areas and share thoughtful insights which will add value to your audience. Poor quality content will be perceived as such and as a consequence will not be shared.
- As a leader you can also create value for your audience through content curation. This means adding value to content by providing a summary, adding context or a perspective to the content you are sharing.
5. Social
- Build high quality networks, quality potentially matters more than quantity.
- Seek out the experts in your field, read what they say, engage them in debate and share your ideas.
6. Media platforms
- It is important you focus on the right platforms and communities
- Where does your audience hang out? Find and focus on the platforms, communities and groups where your audience hangs out.
- Some platforms are far more effective in improving the SEO benefits of SMO than others.
7. Optimization
I have included below some of my thoughts on the practical and technical aspects of optimizing your SMO below.
- Share buttons - make it easy to share for users by adding share buttons to your content. You should also show the numbers of shares to demonstrate social proof.
- Social Icons - group and display your social icons in a prominent place on your site.
- Subscription options - group together subscription options such as email, RSS, and newsletters.
- Shareable content - some content is more readily shareable such as infographics or 5 top tips articles. I think this is partly because it is short and scannable. However, I hope and believe longer but well written content will also be shared.
- Social login - use social login options to make it easy for users to comment.
- Rich snippets - social networks pull in rich snippets, data designed to summarise the content of a page. These are very useful for users. The different social networks pull in this data in different ways. Facebook uses OpenGraph, Twitter uses Twitter Cards and Google Plus will take values from OpenGraph, you just need to set up your authorship profile for your rel="author" tag to work correctly. If you use WordPress you can use the Yoast plugin to manage and optimise these rich snippets
- Title tags - Optimize your title tags for sharing, especially on Twitter where there is a character limit and include your name.
- Images - they really do say more than a thousand words. Include images that add value and include an image that can be used as a thumbnail for your content.
I think these are really useful for reviewing your approach to integrating social media marketing into a website.
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