Some call it Social Media Optimization. Others refer to it as search marketing optimization. Either way, it is the next wave of online marketing, the perfect marriage between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media. As a business in the Internet Age, you can’t exist without addressing the critical issues of online visibility and customer interaction. That’s exactly what SMO is designed to do.
In its simplicity, Social Media Optimization enables you to drive more traffic, interaction, and conversion while learning about your target audience and capturing tangible metrics to gauge your social media initiatives. Consider these benefits:
- Social SEO – More shared links depicts you as an authority to search engines and improves Search Engine Optimization. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all feature top shared content as “Top News”, “Top Tweet”, and “Top Headlines” providing more opportunities to drive traffic.
- User Generated Content (UGC) – Content Writing and curated by users carries greater influence and travels faster than doing it on your own. Voice of the customer (VoC) feedback, questions, testimonials, and insights surface through social interaction, discussion, and sharing.
- Social Proof – Lots of comments or shares proves that content is read- and share-worthy. Featuring these counts can increase social follows, article click-through rates, shared links, and inbound links.
- Social User Experience – Users appreciate the opportunity to participate in discussions and are generally willing to share or discuss content they like or [dramatically] dislike. Open discussion builds a community around the topic.
- Social Metrics – Comments, subscribes, and shares are all useful metrics for measuring the quality of blog content and the success of social media tactics.
Social media is a great way to build brand awareness and encourage customer engagement and loyalty. Studies show that 65% of respondents use social media to learn more about products, services, businesses, and brands. Some 53% compliment brands and 70% read other people’s experiences. The use of social media in searching for businesses is also on the rise, growing three times over the past few years.
SMM on the other hand plays more of an active role in relation to social media by referring to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the social web by some form of viral marketing. This can be anything from creating compelling content that gets bookmarked and even hits digg’s homepage to spreading a viral video by putting it on YouTube and other social media websites.