How Social Media Optimization (SMO) works?
Social Media Optimization
Well, before explaining how social media optimization works it would be poignant to explain what social media optimization is. It is of course on of the less familiar aspects of SEM even to many of the “experts” in this field, who prefer to concentrate on search engine optimization. It is very undervalued and under competed. This, in many ways, makes social media optimization very useful to an SEM although some would say that social media optimization is not part of the job of an SEO or SEM simply because it is not particularly relevant to search engines and doesn’t really give you a big boost in the SERPS. However, if you are implementing SEO then it would be silly not to take advantage of other forms of free marketing online.
The brief definition of SMO
So explaining exactly how social media optimization works is not too hard to explain, it is the use of social media networks such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to drive traffic to a website. The difficult bit is explaining how to do it properly.
Many people do trust friend of a friend recommendations and of course the bonus of this is of course it is free to implement yourself and if you wish to have the service on a large scale it is often considerably cheaper than a PPC campaign. This can be a very tantalising offer to small businesses and also the reason why large scale businesses neglect this form of advertising and miss out on its potential benefits.
The problem with SMO is of course that if done wrong your website can look spammy and the “advertising” you have implemented can actually have a negative effect. Also it can be very time consuming to build a network which actually pays attention to what you post. And this is the reason that many people make a particularly poor decision to gain lots and lots of friends using tacky software’s and send out mass spam messages hoping that by law of adverages some people will visit your site. The conversion rates from this sort of advertising are, rather unsurprisingly, low.
The potential benefits
The best benefits you can expect are through word and mouth and the only way to do this is though organic friend building. Requesting people who may potentially be interested in your product not just every random person you see as this, will in turn; only create negative word of mouth. The bonus you can get from word of mouth is self explanatory, you gain traffic, awareness and potentially sales. The other main benefit is that it works in the same way as an emailed newsletter. It keeps people informed about changes to your brand. Surely this is a good thing as it can increase returning custom. So hopefully this article has helped you understand a little bit more about how social media marketing works.
