SMO – A Digital Marketing All-Star

Social media optimization (SMO) is the use of a number of social media channels to increase the awareness of a product, brand or event. In other words, SMO deals with enhancing your company’s presence and online reputation through interactive communities—not just Twitter and Facebook, but also blogs, forums, and anywhere your business is mentioned or linked to socially.

Whereas search engine optimization, or SEO, is focused on helping ensure your company comes up early in search engine results, SMO does this and more. SMO helps ensure target audiences already know about your company or brand and go looking for you.

SMO helps prove to Google that your website provides valuable information to prospective visitors. The more social media users engage with you and share your content, the more authority you must have in your industry, and so the higher you rank in search results.

SMO can help strengthen your brand and boost visibility, in addition to generating leads and increasing sales. Optimizing your social media builds both awareness of and trust for your business, because prospective customers will see you not only mentioned, but recommended by others.

It is important to note that social shares carry a lot more weight when they’re coming from someone else. By contrast, joining every social media group, community or discussion just to seed links to your content can actually be counterproductive, to both SMO and SEO. Additionally, random link-spreading without engagement and participation can get you unfollowed in your social networks.

To improve SMO for your business, in addition to having great content that is of interest to your followers, you should focus on engaging with target social audiences and contributing to relevant conversations.

Related reading: Increase the visibility of your website naturally