SMO is closely linked to Search Marketing Optimization and has emerged as the new wave which is related to online marketing. This term defines a perfect link-up between search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization. In this ever-growing internet age, it is impossible to ignore critical issues that come in a package with online visibility and thus, improve the quality of customer interaction. This is what SMO has been designed to offer.
Webmasters work on understanding and using social media effectively to transform it into the greatest asset for enhancing organic search results for a site. SMO is extremely helpful to ensure widespread reach to enhance the opportunities to link main business page with people present on the internet. This helps in connecting social media accounts in a consistent branded network o direct potential customers to the respective content online. SMO is used to employ as a tactical as well as multi-point process which can assist a business in designing a successful SMO foundation, in order to advance the process and fetch more customers to the respective site.
While the importance of SMO cannot be denied, there are certain ways and means to increase its impact for any business.
- Clarity on Business Objectives and Set Goals – It is important for every online webmaster to have pre-determined goals and expectations of desired outcome. The outcome can be anything ranging from sales, reputation, influence, charity, credibility to traffic/page views.
- Instills Smartness in People: Any content or article which can make the people feel and grow smarter has more likeability to be shared with friends online.
- Increases Linkability: In the attempt to optimize a site to work wonders on various social media platforms, enhancing the linkability of the content is quite important. There is a list of other ways like designing white papers and thought pieces, or aggregating content which exists transforming into a useful format.
- Tagged Content Travels Faster: Content can be tagged to reach more and more people online. Also one has to ensure that the tags include relevant ones along with some suggested notes appear automatically as soon as one hits go on the site
- Ensures Easier Access to Content: SMO works on designing content which is easy to view with the help of short links such as video files, PDFs, and audio files. This also helps the content to travels faster while remaining absolutely traceable. This way, visitors can reach the site easily.
- Make use of Permalinks in Blogs for Keywords and Sharing: As a simple rule of blog posting, as soon as a blog is posted, permalinks automatically capture keywords in the form of URL titles which are looked up to by search engine crawlers. Putting such links at the bottom of the blog enable the readers to easily copy and share the content.
- SMO Rewards Valuable Influencers: As a ‘to and fro policy’, one must always share content of those who are sharing your content. It is a yet smarter way to raise visibility for the content posted online.
- Stay Humble: Always make mentions of those who have helped in a webmaster to be a BlogStar. State those who have helped along the way to make the content popular.
- Share Ideas and Let Others Take Them Over: The notion of Social Media Optimization is to take up an idea and give others the leverage to get the same adopted by other communities.
- Be Clear About the Target Audience: SMO can only be successful if a business knows who its target audiences are? There will always be a certain set of audience which can be easily appealed and will trust a brand. So it becomes crucial to assess what type of audiences are approaching and learning about their expectations to build their confidence.
- By Dynamic and New: For online success, it is important that the content stays fresh. Since Social Media is changing on a steadfast pace, it is important to know new tools, products and challenges that are enveloped in the social sphere.
Social media optimization and marketing always demand and generate need for tools that can help any business in marketing, research and promotion or analytics. Some of the helpful tools are howsociable.com, knowem.com, Social Media for Firefox, semrush.com, Google Insights, Page Inlink Analyzer, majesticseo.com, socialmention.com, bit.ly, analytics.postrank.com etc.
Let’s understand these tools in detail below:
- How Sociable: This is a helpful tool to measure social presence for a keyword or brand. This tool is widely used by agencies to take snapshots of customer social presence metrics which play a vital role in running and success of social media optimization programs. This tool is quite easy to use and comes at a low price, similar to free social media monitoring tools.
- KnowEm: It available as both free as well as paid service that provides a quick glimpse whether the brand terms or keywords are registered as social profiles or on social media web sites. This is inclusive of blogging platforms, social news sites and bookmarking services. KnowEm helps the users to complete all those profiles, create off-site promotion channels and guard against brand name squatters.
- Social Media for Firefox: This tool has emerged as a brand new browser add-on to the list. It functions as a handy option to evaluate and identify upcoming news items which have fetched popularity on several social news and bookmarking services. It also helps in singling out the articles which are gaining popularity on services such as Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon and offers heads up to submit on all the other impactful services. The primary reasons behind using this tool is that if a news item gains score on one service, it has brighter chances of becoming popular on services likewise. Stick to this tool; give it time and focus to let it function in your favor.
- SEMRush – It is regarded as an interesting tool which helps is identifying keyword visibility, employed in both organic and PPC on Google for almost any domain. It renders basic help in uncovering insight by working in combination standard and social keyword research. It can actually be of great help to run various social media optimization programs.
- Google Insights for Search: This is a tool which is quite handy and follows a list of research trends with respect to various keywords either single or in combination. One can impose filters for geographic location, search type, industry or topical category, timeframe to refine useful information about what is in requirement.
- Eric Miraglia ‘s Inlink Analyzer: This is a backlink analysis tool which is based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer and helps in counting and displaying source links related to a particular URL. Additionally, it showcases if source links which are bookmarked on Delicious along with keyword tags used. Such an insight proves to be useful for developing the relationship between link popularity and social keywords.
- Majestic SEO: It is renowned as one of the most powerful and useful link analysis tools. It is available as free version which provides the count of link acquisition over time. Webmasters can fetch full reports for the site as soon as it gets validated. By choosing a paid service over the free version, users can fetch juicy link details which draw comparison with the competitors. This tool helps in finding high impact links that can be employed in standard SEO and sites that are getting the highest links from other sites. It also unveils the source of getting inbound links from various social destinations such as Facebook, blog, Twitter.
- SocialMention: It is a real-time free social search tool which hands over a plethora of search options such as just forums, just blogs, just bookmarks along with output in the search results. It also endows indication of basic sentiment and discloses social keywords which are linked to your query. It is reviewed as the most useful and cost-free social search tool available online.
- Bit.ly URL – This tool is rock solid, absolutely dependable and critical in a scenario where a user relies on their URL redirect to fetch traffic to the content being promoted. The users also have the option to link basic statistics for each URL to evaluate how productive a site is as soon as it gets shared. This works as a reliable URL shortener and makes this entire thing as “go to” URL shortening service.
- PostRank – This tool offers an appropriate measure of engagement when assessed on the individual document level. As a user, if one pays attention, one can get the required data on any website in the database. Also, it enables the users to easily see and review content that is posted on competitor’s blogs which is getting popular. Signing up for PostRank Analytics service can help a user to incorporate Google Analytics data in combination with social engagement metrics. Such comparisons direct the users to understand and plan their time wisely to run a Social Media Optimization Program.