Social Media Optimization

Social Media marketing SMM Network Web Online Internet Concept

Social Media optimization is the use and target of gaining as much awareness of a product, event or brand through social media outlets and communities. A few types of social media that can be used to optimize awareness are Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as well as various other networking sites. The main goal of SMO is to attract as many visitors to a particular website. The answer to gaining as many visitors is to post as much entertaining content to lure a visitor to the website. For example, liking and commenting on certain Facebook posts, liking and retweeting particular tweets. ORM (Object Relational Management) can also be used effectively to ensure that negative feedback of a website is not the first thing a visitor may come across when searching a company on a particular search engine.

Social Media sites are gradually becoming more of a factor into what search engines recommend to users. The more a website is shared or ‘liked’ on social media sites, this will count as a vote to a search engine and therefore increase the websites chances of popularity from within a search engine. Search engine’s also use personalized search results, this means that a users search results will base on location and social media information. Improved search ranking is a benefit of successful social media optimization.

SMO is very similar and connected to Viral Marketing, through gaining traffic from social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. Following social trends and social networks, websites can retain customers and gain new ones. The main aim of a social book marking campaign is to increase followers, website traffic and search engine ranking. The role is reversed through blogs and blogging sites when it is shared with through social media and therefore increasing social media traffic and subsequently search engine votes. Social Media is not just used by business for marketing and brand building, they can also increase their knowledge management strategy. For example development of product through comparing certain markets, ideal recruitment candidates and customer satisfaction, as well as many more.

There are 16 rules to follow in terms of SMO. Marketer Rohit Bhargava established the first 5 rules of SMO in a 2006 blog. He believed if a company followed his rules they could certainly increase their levels of website traffic and popularity. An effective way of Bloggers to benefit from SMO is to use widgets, which allows users to share content on their social media platforms. Widgets include user counters to indicate how many times content has been liked and shared across social media sites. Professional content creation tools such as photoshop can be used in order to stand out to visitors and gain more traffic.

Social Media gaming promotes social media interaction.

There are 3 commonly used strategies to increase advertising reach on Facebook. ‘Highlighted’ posts that have been heavily shared and interacted with that are usually found at the top of newsfeeds. Facebook connect launched in 2008 which allows users to sign up to different sites, competitions with their existing Facebook log ins. Benefit to businesses as visitors are more likely to share their content. Facebook allows advertisers to take visitors sign up details i.e age, gender, likes etc. Then the advertisers can then decide how best to market themselves and who will be most likely interested in their product.