Social Media Optimization (SMO) for Online Marketing
How to Boost Your Online Marketing Results with Social Media
SMO is like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Social Media
Simple ideas for using social media to boost your marketing and generate a higher engagement rate, more reach and impressions online.
There are a lot of similarities when comparing building a website to an online presence.
Can you think of some examples on how we can use social media to boost online marketing results?
Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter…. Each platform gives us a different way of generating content and sharing it with others. We can consider each application as a template for making a simple website targeting the sharing of specific forms of content.
Instagram is very photographic, whereas Facebook is a blend with more content intensive sharing, meanwhile Twitter ensures we use only the right number of characters in order to reveal a message. It’s always fun to keep a little cryptic!
Even though it’s extremely simple to implement a basic social media marketing plan, you must spend time carefully outlining some goals and a path to reach them before undertaking this project. Click here for some extra ideas to consider before starting your SMM promotions.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. We are not liable or responsible for any damages resulting from or related to your use of this information.
Share High Quality Content with Your Fans
As with any type of marketing, if you sacrifice quality for quantity, your reputation may suffer.
This only make sense, right?
Resist the urge to upload as many videos or as much content as possible as a primary driver for your social media marketing campaign. Users are inundated with content from friends, the people they are already following and advertisements. You have to create a quality impression to gain a following. Sometimes we’re only given a single chance to gain someone’s attention and trust, so we have to make it count.
Introducing Social Media Optimization
What is social media optimization?
Social media optimization (SMO) is finding ways to increase the reach and sharing of online content.
SMO is about increasing the awareness and clout of a product or service by making social media content more visible to others. Social media optimization can be about ranking posts and other content to make them more visible to individuals looking for them. This is just the same as the blogger of a website wanting their page to show up on relevant Google searches. Therefore, a lot of methodology used to rank posts on social media is similar to that of a website on search engines.
In other terms, SMO practices help content travel further; the idea is about increasing linkages between content and others, making it more accessible and placed in the hands of people looking for it.
Social Media to Boost Your Marketing
Creative titles and headlines with powerful keywords tempt people to read more
Many social media applications require carefully curated content, just like a website does.
Intriguing and engaging titles or captions can be your company’s best friend on social media. Hashtags are also important for people finding high quality content online. Spamming a photo with hashtags is not an effective means to promoting content; therefore, hashtags used must be relevant to the content being shared.
If you want to work with the algorithm of a platform, this includes a strong hashtag game. A strong hashtag game matches content in photos with appropriate tags. A picture of you sitting at a laptop in a coffee shop will probably not do well in fitness categories, but could do well in #crypto, #blogging, and many other places.
Creating a quality video title on YouTube is more relevant than on Instagram (as it has no place for a title); nonetheless, in most cases, this idea plays a huge part of social media optimization strategy for Facebook and other information intensive platforms.
Hiring a Social Media Manager for Optimization
Who is best to represent your brand?
Think twice about paying for a professional social media marketing service.
It is possible to do SMM and SMO on your own; both will take some elbow grease and a lot of planning. If this is not an option, it is always beneficial to hire someone who is knowledgeable about your niche. People familiar with a particular space will talk the talk and walk the walk naturally (they know powerful keywords without knowing), which may give you a one up on your competitors.
On the other hand, there are a lot of frauds who take advantage of a business and individuals who are not familiar with how Internet marketing works. Some SMM companies use low quality YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts which may do more harm than good. In the end, it’s good to know someone who will be upfront and honest with you as you are with them.
Add social sharing buttons to your blog posts and website
Make your social media accounts and websites work hand-in-hand.
Putting social network widgets on your website to help advertise your content on all platforms is a great idea. These widgets can help out your site’s visibility a lot. For example, they allow readers to re-tweet and possibly even vote on your content with ease.
Using these Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sharing features to market will allow your blog’s visitors to share content with people on their own friend’s lists. What better way is there to generate organic growth than getting friends and family sharing your content with other link minded individuals?
This means that more people will be able to access your blog and, in turn, those visitors may purchase your products or services. This also does wonders for SEO, especially when website visitors are those who spend time reading your content and increase your on-page average time statistics.
Search engines will make content more accessible for others to see when by funneling quality traffic (those interested in your work) to it.
Share Positive Messages with Your Fans
Postings on any social media site should be humble and universally appealing.
While this may not seem much like an optimization trick, it is still very important in creating quality content. If you don’t like the topic of what you’re sharing, you’re less likely to care about producing quality content on it. Posting will be less frequent when it’s not enjoyed, which does impact the reach of your feed or website.
Social media platforms reward frequent users who share quality content, spam is never desirable and sharing it can negatively impact your brand and reach.
Regardless of how big your business is, your subscribers and fans will generate a backlash against low quality content or if your content comes across as bragging and cocky. While sometimes it’s a good idea to create some polarity, most often it is best to avoid expressing the opinion that you are more important or powerful than your customers and followers. They’re the reason for your success!
Keep Content Flowing to Your Fans
The optimal frequency of posting depends on each platform
Content should be optimized for each platform it’s shared on.
For example, posting on Twitter as often as possible is more beneficial than doing so on other platforms, like Instagram, which can take more time to create unique and powerful content. Therefore, focusing on volume of content being shared isn’t always the best method to marketing on social media. This is especially true when followers want high quality content.
You should do your homework and find out what works best with social media marketing for each platform. Since every social media site is different, by understanding the differences you can tailor your approach to reach your goals. You may find that one particular site is best for attracting the target audience that you are seeking, so it may be best to focus resources here.
Create a strong network to share your content with
Fuse your website with your social media accounts for increased reach.
For example, YouTube videos should be strongly linked to all other online presences, not only a website. The interconnections of each social media platform is a great tool to make use of. If you make sure your channel and your individual videos link to Twitter and Facebook, you’ll have a higher chance of getting more organic inertia.
If you can get people who view your video in full to share it on social media, your audience will swell. Like with a website, user time spent watching a video is very important to the YouTube algorithm.
A little polarity can be your best friend.
While it is nice to be liked, sometimes you must deal with negativity too. Remarks should be dealt with quickly to show you care about your customers. Humor can bring the most light to these situations.
Be ready for the negativity that goes along with using social media. Especially if you make it into the spotlight. Sadly, this is just a natural phenomenon. Fortunately, this means you’re going viral and getting traction, as people want to siphon energy from your content to themselves or their brand.
Communication is key to success
Treat your fans and potential customers like gold.
Help your customers feel that their concerns, questions, and feedback are important to you. People get frustrated when talking to a faceless company. Speaking to an individual one-on-one makes that person feel that they’re important. If you do your SMO right, you should be seeing more comments and other forms of engagement on posts!
Having patience is key when you begin to network through social media. Mistakes will happen to learn!
People have to trust you and the product that you are selling to them. When someone trusts you, they will take time to review your content when it becomes available. This incentive to see content when it is released is also great for ranking, a factor impacting social media optimization.
Concluding Thoughts
How can social media optimization (SMO) help increase the reach of our content?
Optimizing content, especially titles on specific platforms like YouTube, by using strong and relevant keywords is highly relevant towards getting more engagement on social media. While a lot of users end up utilizing click bait, and do get a lot of views, individuals seeing this content are often left with a bitter taste in their mouth.
Trust is a superseding heuristic that will get people to seek out, view and share your content. While communication between yourself and fans may be not a traditional optimization strategy, it very much is as those who fully view and enjoy content end up helping it rank higher in searches.
The number one thing to consider is how concepts of search engine optimization (SEO) for a website can be utilized for ranking content on social media. Content is always king, so provide your customers with the information they desire. Always give your fans a reason to share and promote your work, one of the best catalysts towards gaining organic momentum on any social media outlet.
We hope you enjoyed this article about using social media to boost your marketing!
Like / comment / bookmark us to check back for more articles in the future!
Click here to go back to the home page.
