Social Media Optimization
What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?
Social media optimization (SMO) is a technique of marketing in which you market your website in various social networking sites like MySpace, Youtube, Digg etc. Also known as Web 2.0 marketing, SMO acts as a powerful tool to increase the traffic and page ranking of your website. It engages a wider audience through excessive promotion via the public portals. The success of SMO lies in its interactive content sharing through mediums like blogs, video files and more.
Why use Social Media Optimization (SMO)?
Social media optimization, sometimes referred as social book-marking, is about building a relationship between your website and a wide group of potential customer. Social media if effectively used can consistently direct a substantial amount of traffic. Some of its advantages are
- Increased traffic to your website
- Increased public awareness of your site and product
- Increased brand value
- Increased inbound link
- Increased ranking due to increased inbound and back links
Thus, social media optimization promotes your business by increasing high user awareness through social sites. This subsequently acts as the marketing strategy for incremental promotion of your product translating into increased conversion.
What are the parameters used by Social media optimization (SMO)?
Social media optimization follows the newer version of the ‘word of mouth’ technique where people have been replaced by social networking sites. The content is spread in the form of pictures, movie clips, blogs and more. This technique is known as viral marketing where user awareness of the site spreads across different community site. Some methodologies/functionalities used by SMO are
- Social book-marking using buttons like ‘Digg this’
- Using YouTube videos
- Interaction through social network sites like Hi5 and Facebook
- Sharing audio and picture files
- Blogging
- Frequently updating data using RSS feed
- Promotion through news groups, newsletters, e-mails and forums
What is Social Media Optimization service?
Social media optimization (SMO) service customizes a complete social media website with optimized pages for the network socialite and search engine. The SMO activity would ideally involve the following steps:
- Increasing the site linkability by making it social media friendly
- Creating awareness through viral marketing
- Using free/paid advertisements as a promotional tool
- Customizing application to geographical locations
- Creating brand awareness by integrating blogs, newsgroups etc
- Community building
How is Social Media Optimization (SMO) advantageous than Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SMO and SEO both have a substantial influence on the web traffic. While SEO focuses on website content, links, structure etc to increase the page ranking, SMO is more about networking through social media. Though SEO is equally effective, SMO is more popular due to the following
- Easy to implement and needs no expert
- Result can be seen immediately
- Good profiling leads to heavy traffic
- No fee charged
- Structure of the website not so important
- Internet community functionalities can be effectively used
- Gains maximum exposure
- Encourages online participation by the audience
- Visual presentation is more important than the content
