What is Social Media Optimization?
Social Media Optimization, referred to as SMO, is a digital marketing concept used to increase the effectiveness of overall social media efforts. The efforts put into Social Media Optimization are towards scaling up the company's presence and getting more traction on the official website. Creating just a company profile and being active on social media are considered vile if they don't align with the overall growth and digital marketing strategy of the organization.
With Social Media Optimization, digital marketers try to create a deeper impact on achieving traffic, conversions, and other objectives of the company. A well-thought-out social media optimization strategy can assist you in strengthening your brand, generating more leads, increasing your digital visibility, and connecting with your audience/community.
SMO makes it easier for your company to be discovered by the right people online. SMO connects your website to your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on), making you more visible online and giving your audience more ways to connect and interact with you. SMO aims to frequently direct the audience from social media platforms to the company's website, where additional information can be provided.
For example, if a company runs a campaign to raise awareness about a new mobile phone on social media, and through those social media posts, it aims to get visitors to a company webpage that provides information and pre-booking options.
What is the importance of Social Media Optimization and why invest in it?
Based on a report by Hubspot, 21% of consumers will unfollow a brand on social media due to repetitive content, 19% of consumers will unfollow due to frequent posting, and 15% for irrelevant content. Thus, social media marketers must track engagement on all social profiles to determine how useful and relevant their content is, how much the audience can relate to it, and what are the outcomes that these posts are giving. The majority of companies and brands aim at prioritizing the consumer experience and their conversations more than anything. Therefore, it's extremely important to take results into consideration before investing your budget into anything around social media efforts.
Social media optimization will ensure that you are investing in the right areas, allowing you to turn the tables at the right time and improve your performance. In the past, the distinction between marketing aimed at optimizing search engines (SEM) and marketing centered on the use of social networks was easy to see (SMO). Today, this line is practically non-existent. Not only are the two strategies allies, but they are also essentially complementary.
Accordingly, if brands want to align their social marketing efforts and drive results out of their SEO practices, they should focus parallelly on Social Media optimization. It'll help the brand to create more traction over the online platforms, generate more leads, and conversions, and improve customer experience.
What are the benefits of Social Media Optimization?
A. Social Media Optimization not just focuses on the online presence but on strengthening and leveraging it for brand identity and recognization.
B. SMO also allows companies to engage customers on a deeper level and encourages them to move through the sales funnel with ease and at a higher pace.
C. The goal of Social Media Optimization is not just to be active on social media platforms but also to strategically place the brand in the digital space, increasing awareness.
D. Combined with SEO and SEM efforts, Social Media Optimization can enable the brand to reach out to more and more customers, rather right customers, and generate conversions and leads.
E. SMO enhances the quality of the leads that you get from social media given its focus and strategic approach.
What are the most effective Social Media Optimization techniques?
1. Optimize your social media strategy
One of the most common reasons for brands to fall behind in the social media world is a lack of strategy. You'll need a social media optimization strategy with a clear goal and objectives to accomplish this perfectly. A good strategy will emphasize growth and measurable outcomes. You will stand out and make necessary improvements if you have a strategy on paper.
2. Test headlines and captions
Hire a copywriter or a social media expert to assist you in creating catchy headlines and captions that achieve your objectives. If not a content writer, just proofread and experiment with content. Keep in mind that the copy for Twitter may be completely different from the copy for TikTok. Experiment with different languages and words to see which ones resonate the most with your target audience.
3. Create consistency with your username
Your social media username says a lot about who you are and is an important piece of the puzzle in terms of how your brand is perceived. As a result, it's critical to keep your username consistent. For example, if your company is into selling pickup parts, your content should include this term/phrase as people would be looking for your product with the same keywords.
4. Relevant hashtags
When it comes to social media optimization techniques, hashtags are just as important as the content itself. In some form or another, hashtag integrations are available on every platform, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others. Hashtags improve the quality of the content and increase its visibility. They make it simple to track and categorize the content.
5. Using Conversational AI for engagements
Engaging customers and constant communication are important to maintaining the social media presence and driving maximum outputs. Using conversational AI can boost engagements and interactions by multifold that can help brands to get more and more conversions, marketing leads, and visitors on the website. You can use Engati AI-enabled chatbots and automate your social media engagement, and interaction.
6. Conduct keyword research
Keywords research is one of the most important elements, out of all the things that we consider for SEO. Keyword research is all about finding the right words and phrases that help your website/product or brand rank higher on the search engine result pages. For example, if your brand is into selling flavored salt, your content should include this term/phrase as people would be looking for your product with the same keywords.
7. Leverage Social Media analytics
Often brands don't take a close look at the analytics or go through the reports. Tracking your Social Media Optimization is essential because it reveals how effective your strategy is. Bit.ly can be used to track URLs using Google Analytics. You should also monitor social media metrics in addition to traffic. This will show you how many people have interacted with each of your posts. Likes, shares, retweets, comments, and other metrics are used by all social media platforms to track engagement.
8. Always keep your audience top of mind
Optimizing content as per your customer base is extremely important. You can use analytics and insights to gauge what kind of audience engages with your postings. Your content should align with the target audience and communicate things that they are interested in. Generally, companies have certain buyer personas in mind while they roll out their marketing strategy.
9. Post the right amount and at the right time
Spamming or excessively posting content on social media pages is not the way to catch hold of your audience's attention. The number of posts that you roll out on a day or on a weekly basis impacts your audience. According to a report by Hootsuite, 19% of your audience unfollows your brands due to excessive posting. Scheduling and trying different times of posting can really help you optimize your social media efforts.
10. Content optimization and visuals
Visual appeal always works for the audience. Try optimizing the content that you put across and make visuals more appealing and engaging. You can't succeed at social media marketing if your website's content isn't up to standard. Original content is content that you create yourself, and it can include things like relevant infographics, texts, reports, photos, and other media.
11. Optimize your links with UTMs
Understanding how your audience interacts with the links you share necessitates link optimization. You can see which posts generate the most traffic from your links by tracking your customers' behavior. Adding UTMs to your social media channels and posts allows you to track behavior quickly and easily.
