Social Media Optimization
First and foremost it’s important to understand what exactly Social Media Optimization or SMO means and then we can go on and discover why it matters for modern businesses. Just as all of us got used to SEO, Search Engine Optimization, along comes its little brother SMO. SMO includes your company’s likability, the ease of sharing your content, rewarding engagement, getting communities connected, and encouraging the mashup. Increasing your social media optimization will improve your websites chances of getting noticed.
Social Media Optimization |The Mashup
These five components are the golden rules for SMO. All of these marketing techniques are pretty self exclamatory and if you stick with us, we will be sure to give you plenty of techniques to successfully do all these things. However, let’s take a minute to discuss the last rule of SMO: encouraging the mashup.
Instead of boring you with the technical jargon and IT definition of a mashup, think about SMO mashup as an image, we will use something simple, a cheeseburger. So a cheeseburger is composed of many different parts: bread, lettuce, tomato, cheese, and meat. The meat is the business itself. The cheese is your video content, probably supported by YouTube or Vimeo. The tomato is your business’s Facebook page. The lettuce is the Twitter page. And finally the bread is what holds it or rather links it all together.
Successful SMO must incorporate all of your pages together through links. Your Facebook page should include your YouTube videos that would then link to your YouTube account. From your YouTube account we should be able to Tweet or Facebook Like the video. From our Twitter or blog, we should be able to directly connect to your Facebook page, official business page, or YouTube account and vice versa.
Got it? Basically this not only simplifies navigation for your customer, but it also increases your visibility in searches and reaches out to the millions of potential customers surfing all of those sites. That’s SMO, with that, you will in turn make it easy to share as well! And there are many simple ways of making this happen by simply adding buttons and links to your already designed sight. There is no need for prior HTML knowledge, it doesn’t take a computer programmer.
Social Media Optimization |Who’s Using SMO Techniques?
All of the Fortune 100 companies are social media savvy, therefore versed in SMO techniques. According to an article from the Huffington Post, “Eighty-two percent of the Fortune 100 companies tweet on a weekly basis, posting an average of 27 tweets a week.” Not convincing enough for ya? Take a look at some of these astonishing statistics from the article before you decide to jump the SMO bandwagon.
- Fortune 100 Companies on average post 3.6 wall posts to their Facenbook page per week.
- 50% of the Fortune 100 have a YouTube account and upload 10 videos on average a month.
- 79% of the Fortune 100 are present and listening, using at least of one of the main social platforms to communicate with their customers
- 20% of Companies are using all four of the main social technologies (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Blogs.
Since Twitter is making the biggest business presence, its important to note it’s amazing global presence: 40% of Asia Pacific countries use Twitter, 67% in Latin America, 71% in Europe, and 72% in the United States. You’ve accomplished so much already, you can now speak confidently about SMO, and that is the first step in developing your new SMO marketing techniques for your business.