People’s reaction to social media largely falls into two camps.
Those that are complete social media junkies who feel naked without their daily fix of interaction and those who know it’s out there, feel it’s not their thing and despite huge media bombardment, resist all attempts at launching into social media.
As an individual you have every right to go against social media trends but as a company, website or brand owner, social media denial is not an option. With or without your knowledge or approval you are no doubt already being spoken about in social media channels.
Social media – attack is the best form of defence
Ignoring social media is not a good strategy. Social media optimisation (SMO) is a highly important process to develop your online presence. SMO carries out very different processes to search engine optimisation (SEO) but has the same ultimate goal: you, your company, your brand and your products. Like SEO, SMO works to build attention to your website and build your online visibility.
SEO and SMO – what’s the difference
SEO is all about optimising website structure, content and inbound links to ensure that there are no barriers to stop search engines crawling your website, thereby getting good positioning in search engines.
Social media optimisation (SMO) revolves around fully opening your website to help people find, distribute and most importantly share your website.
A very simple analogy to try and break down the differences… SEO gets your garden in shape, plants the right plants and sends out the pollen that attracts the bees. The bees place pheromone chemical traces that let all other bees know of an excellent food source. At that stage all is good, your garden is blossoming but why rest there?
Bees are sociable things and your garden could always do with variety as you wouldn’t want to place all your hard investment with one group.
SMO further nurtures your garden, the bees go to other places and spread the news. Scents and pollen from your garden disseminate in other gardens and in turn other bees and different insects start visiting. SMO visits places these bees like frequenting and spreads the good news. You garden is now truly blooming and you can reap the benefits.
Social media optimisation – engagement
Ignore social media at your peril… well maybe not peril but certainly to your detriment. It is imperative that you consider SMO and when we used the word attack we should maybe consider using alternative words such as engage.
SMO is all about engaging people. Using our garden analogy once again you could hardly force visitors, you need to entice them and social media optimisation does this.
Enough of the analogy – what are the benefits of SMO?
It all sounds bucolic and lovely but the brutal truth is that life is all about ROI. What am I going to get out of social media optimisation? What can SMO do, show me the results.
SMO can:-
- Build a large volume of inbound links and increase site traffic
- Help with conversion of visitors, after all they came willingly as you engaged them right from the start
- Instant exposure
- Huge volume of social media users
- Improve brand awareness
- Help you understand what your customers like, dislike and allows you to get feedback and response directly from them
SMO – why do I have to consider social media optimisation?
This article does not want to instil fear, we’ve toned down words like peril and attack but as stated throughout, social media denial is not an option. Your company, products and brands are already undoubtedly been spoken about.
Run a simple query through some social media channels on the thread of “x sucks” (replace x with the name of a popular American high street coffee shop) and you get significant feedback on people that don’t like that coffee shop. x now has a choice and chance to try and convert those disbelievers and engage them or work on their feedback to improve their reputation.
Inversely, a search for “x rocks” bring back a huge list of devotees who can be engaged and can create huge potential for marketing.
Either way, SMO can bring significant rewards and ignorance will do nothing for reputation management or brand awareness.
Overwhelmed?
Not sure what to do, has SMO KO’ed you with too much information? Here at The WebMarketing Group we have a highly intelligent, hard working and dedicated colony of bees working hard for our clients and their social media optimisation needs.
Contact us now or call 0845 555 5040 to discuss how we can help.
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