One of the best ways to increase product, brand or event awareness is by utilizing SMO (Social Media Optimization).
Businesses use SMO to connect with customers, rectify potentially damaging news, build trust, and rank well on universal search results.
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How Is SMO Different from Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
Both SMM and SMO are important pillars of the in the world of Digital Marketing.
Many people are confused about these two marketing methods and about their impact and purpose.
SMO is a new marketing strategy that followed the advent of SMM.
It involves development of profiles on social networks.
With SMO, your main goal would be to make your profile available in social networks so that members of those networks can see your profile and share it with others.
With that, you can attract members of the community and also provide them with relevant and helpful information.
SMM, on the other hand, is the use of social media networks to promote a business.
It may involve conversations with customers on their preferred social networks and may include paid social advertising.
A lot of social paid advertising follows the PPC model, which means advertisers don’t pay money until someone clicks on the advertisement.
How Can SMO Help Your Business Attract Customers and Gain Profit?
With the help of SMO, businesses can attract customers and if successful, a business may be able to generate buzz all over the internet about their products and services.
Below are the five ways in which SMO can help businesses:
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Make new customers
Social media, as the name implies, is all about socializing. If you increase your presence in Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and so on, you give potential customers the opportunity to access your website easily.
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Retain old customers
Many businesses believe that SMO does not only target new customers but also help in keeping old ones. The way to do that is by creating new offers and deals that do not only attract new customers but also keep your old customers interested in you and your products and services.
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Get quick feedback
Create social media content that will keep people talking about you on social media. Then you can get straight and direct feedback from your audience.
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Save on marketing expenses
If you’re weary about the expense generated from traditional marketing methods, it’s SMO that can help you ease the pressure on your pocket.
General features in social media platforms are free.
But you must remember that it is not only money that you are investing with your social media campaigns.
You also use your time and energy. To help you save on those resources, you need to be be a good communicator, keep your level of commitment high and, yes, do the hard work.
SMO Techniques
The techniques below have the goal of increasing your social media presence and your web traffic for free.
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Facebook Fan Page
If you haven’t yet created a Facebook Fan page, it’s now time that you do it. Many businesses generate about half of their traffic via Facebook regardless of their SEO techniques. To interest among Facebook users, never create links on the site without Thumbnails.
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Create a Twitter Profile
Do you have a Twitter account and have you created a Twitter profile for your website or business?
If the answer is yes, that’s good.
You can accomplish a lot with Twitter and if real-time live chats will do your business good, do it the Twitter way and accomplish a lot of positive results.
Pick a good name for you business and when tweeting, make sure your tweets are plain, simple and short.
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Use Social Bookmarking Sites
Social bookmarking is a technique that you can also use.
To get started, submit content from your site or your blog.
Then build your network by sharing bookmarks.
Next, endorse your affiliation through your bookmarking sites.
Finally, encourage others to include you in their network and add your site, page or blog to their bookmarks.
Create accounts on popular social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Stumble Upon, Digg and Delicious.
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Use Flickr
Every photo that you will add to Flickr is one “keyword” opportunity. This is because every time that you share a photo, you will be allowed to add a Title, Description and Keyword Tags.
Use each opportunity to optimize a photo that people will easily find when they search Flickr and other sites that offer Flickr results.
Remember also that Flickr is not just a photo-sharing site.
There are communities within.
If you have an account in this site, then you can take the advantage of the chance to make friends and share photos with them or post comments.
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Go to Forums
People have the wrong notion that Forums are already an old concept and using them cannot significantly help in increasing traffic. That’s not completely true. Businesses are still using them to build links and traffic, so Forums will remain young and useful. Where do people discuss about things? It’s in the Forums.
Some Basic Things on How to Optimize Social Media for Businesses
Here are some of the things you can do to optimize social media for your business:
- First, make sure that the profiles you make are not “private”. Make all of them public, so that Google crawlers can easily find your profile and content.
- Know the right platforms for your business. Avoid spending resources on platforms that cannot generate results. In other words, identify where your audience is.
Different platforms cater to different audiences.
For instance, Quora is a place where people throw questions to be answered by participants.
If you want to make a good impression on people on how knowledgeable you are on certain subjects, or products, or services, you might as well try Quora.
If your business needs to focus on increasing brand awareness, you might as well do it through Facebook.
There are about 1.2 billion users of Facebook, covering people from different age groups and walks of life.
Here are the user figures for Twitter: 37% of users are aged 18-29, while 25% of them are aged 30-49 years old. About 55% of these people spend around $50,000 per year.
Outside the US, the top three countries with the most number of users are Brazil (28 million), Japan (26 million) and Mexico (23.5 million).
You may also use LinkedIn to increase brand awareness. However, most users of this platform come from big companies.
The platform is also used by people who want to attract investors for their companies.
Here are some stats for LinkedIn: Over 70% of users live outside the US. Fifty-six percent of them are males.
About 40 million of users are students and recent graduates. Sixty-one million of users are senior level influencers and about 40 million hold decision-making positions.
The photo-sharing site Instagram has 1 billion active monthly users, with 500 million of them accessing the site on the daily basis. About 70% of these users are females.
Eighty percent of these users live outside the US.
With regard to age, 59% of Instagram users are aged 18-29 while 33% are aged 30-49.
- Create fresh content and make it shareable across all social media platforms. Customize your content based on the specific platform. For example, blog posts on blogger, infographic on Pinterest and podcasts on SoundCloud.
- Use SEO techniques: Keyword, Title Tags, Caption, Meta Description, Categories, Alt Text for all your images, infographic, articles and videos.
- Know and engage your audience (share, comment, engage)
4 Steps to Engage Your Audience and Keep Them
As already mentioned, it is important to get new customers and keep your old ones. Apart from giving them new offers and deals, here are some steps to do it.
1. Focus on what you know
It is important that you stick to what you know and that you talk about it a lot. When you post messages, the content must be always related to your business and your industry. According to Facebook, talking about one’s brand is the best strategy in generating audience engagement.
When people click the “like” button on your page, it means that they want to do business with you and that they want you to give them valuable information on your field of expertise. Posting content on things not related to your business will just make your audience disinterested and may eventually cause them to un-follow you.
2. Answer questions and respond to complaints
People need answers to questions and response to their complaints and they need them quick. If you don’t, they will lose interest and do business with others.
Respond in accordance to the issue brought up by the customer. Apologize to the customer and acknowledge any mistakes made at your end. Then provide details on what you can do to correct the problem.
3. Ask questions
Ask questions from your end because questions are great tools to begin conversations in the internet. This is also a good way to make people express their knowledge and opinions.
4. Create content that’s easy to share
People like sharing what they find useful, or amusing. Create entertaining videos that can help lighten people’s mood, or share eye-catching pictures.
