What is SMO?
As social media continues to have an ever-increasing impact on company success, it can seem like businesses are trapped in a never-ending rat race for digital relevancy. Have you ever wondered what leads some companies to overnight internet fame? Why do some instagram accounts achieve millions of followers, while others continue to produce content in obscurity. From a business perspective, how do some online storefronts experience tremendous levels of website traffic, while others struggle to complete a single online order? While numerous factors are at play, an undeniably important one is SMO, or social media optimization.
What is SMO?
According to the Cambridge dictionary, social media optimization is “the use of various methods on social media to make a product or company become well known and popular, so that, for example, people are encouraged to visit a particular website” So at a basic level, SMO is the ways people or businesses look to boost their social presence. What are some practical examples of this? According to Hootsuite, there are five main areas of social media optimization. These areas all build social success, but they also feed off one another.
Engagement Optimization. Engagement refers to the level of interaction your followers or viewers have with your social profiles. Some examples of engagements include likes, shares or comments. In general, the more you can increase engagement, the more successful your social profiles will be.
Growth Optimization: Growth is usually measured by the number of followers that a social profile has. The main goal with growth optimization is driving the overall visibility of your profile. By including hashtags, relevant keywords and tagging other accounts, you can increase your chances of being found and followed by social users.
Conversion Optimization: For businesses, the ultimate goal of social media is to drive sales. To make this happen, focus on making the purchasing journey as seamless as possible. Now, with direct shopping links, companies can instantly take interested scrollers into committed customers.
Accessibility Optimization: The focus of accessibility optimization is to make sure that the visual and audio elements of your social profiles are as inviting as possible to potential followers. Remember, you may only get one chance to capture a social media scroller. Make sure to prioritize high-quality images and subtitles with all videos, this will maximize appeal and viewability.
Overall Performance Optimization: To assess the overall optimization of your social profiles, you need to review social performance against your social media strategy. What goals do you have for your social media, and are you meeting those goals? Analytics can be a helpful method for determining whether your social performance is up to par.
Origins of SMO
SMO has been around since nearly the beginning of social media. Since at least 2006, when early social media platforms like MySpace and Facebook were growing in popularity, the term has been used to describe ways that social media sites can be tweaked for maximum user friendliness. By that point, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, was widely used to refer to making web pages more friendly to search results. Just as SEO is used to drive traffic through search engines, SMO is meant to drive traffic through social platforms. As social media has grown, so has social media optimization strategies and techniques. Consider the explosive growth of companies like Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Hubspot. Companies are continually realizing that often, the business that wins the social media race wins the overall success race.
SMO Vs. SEO
SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, has been a pillar of internet marketing for several decades.According to one source, SEO became a focused practice in the late 1990s. The focus of SEO is placing a company’s website as high as possible on web search results. This was originally accomplished through placing as many keywords as possible in a given webpage, and making sure that hyperlinks were present. In the early days of SEO, the focus was quantity over quality. As search engines have become more refined, there is still a heavy focus on keywords and links to other pages. However, quality has become much more relevant. Now, websites can actually lose SEO ranking for “spamming” keywords, and content needs to be perceived as credible and authoritative by the search engine’s quality ranking system.
In contrast to SEO, SMO is focused strictly on social platforms. While SEO tends to focus on direct conversions, SMO generally favors engagement and community growth. SMO can be a pathway to building long-term relationships with consumers by leveraging social media’s ability to generate connections between creator and viewer. SEO and SMO can also complement each other within a digital marketing strategy by focusing on different sources of traffic acquisition, SEO through web searches and SMO through social media.
How can SMO Drive Revenue?
SMO will also increase in importance as social media continues to grow. One trend that highlights the growth of social media in the life of the consumer is social media shopping. On Instagram alone, nearly 22% of Americans browse products for shopping, and over 200 million users tap on a shopping post or business profile every day. This trend is even more pronounced generationally, with nearly 40% of millennials regularly browsing on Instagram for consumer products. This data clearly demonstrates that prioritizing social media success through SMO can enhance a company’s overall revenue.
Next Steps for SMO
Now that you’ve seen how SMO can drive digital marketing growth, consider how you can utilize it for your business. Analyzing strengths, weaknesses and opportunities can maximize your use of social media. One great first step is to examine how your target audience uses social media. How can you modify your content to reach them more effectively, and what seems to be working now? What weaknesses do you see in your social platforms?
Once you have an idea of how you can improve your social media, creating a comprehensive strategy will help guide your campaigns. Knowing the why behind your posts will make creating content much easier. As you post campaign content, tools like analytics can help track the effectiveness of your strategy. Here at Lifeboat Optimization, we will continue to curate content to help you effectively take the next step for your business’s social media!