Social Media Optimization

What Is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

Social media optimization (SMO) is the use of social media networks to manage and grow an organization’s message and online presence. As a digital marketing strategy, social media optimization can be used to increase awareness of new products and services, connect with customers, and ameliorate potential damaging news.

Understanding Social Media Optimization (SMO)

For many years, search engine optimization (SEO) was the standard for digital marketing efforts. While social media optimization and search engine optimization have similar goals–to generate web traffic and increase awareness for a company’s website–search engine optimization is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine, especially Google.

More recently, social media marketing has come to the fore, at times converging with SEO and in some instances replacing it as the most effective way to strengthen a brand, conduct lead generation, increase a company’s visibility in the online space, and connect to an audience. Various social media platforms can be used for digital marketing, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Social media optimization often directs the public from these social media platforms to the company’s website, where more information can be provided. For example, a campaign to raise awareness about a new automobile on social media may direct the visitor to a company webpage that provides information about where local dealerships are located and how to schedule a test drive.

Strategies for Social Media Optimization

Companies using multiple social media platforms may use Internet-based tools designed to improve the organization and delivery of their content. These tools allow an employee tasked with creating social media content to schedule content across multiple platforms at the same time, as well as respond to any engagements on the posts including comments or messages from the audience. Some popular social media management tools are Loomly, AgoraPulse, Promo Republic, Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social.

Sharing tools on social media platforms allow users can share content on the Internet almost instantaneously. Because of this, many companies try to create content that users will pass along to their friends and connections. This strategy, called viral marketing, attempts to achieve a broader reach by getting engaged users of social media platforms to share content rather than relying on users to find the content on their own.

5 Steps to Social Media Optimization

In order to optimize your social media channels, you need to come up with a social media optimization plan and then execute on it. If you follow these five steps, you’ll likely be on your way to an optimized social media presence that plays nice with search.

1. Analyze your audience

As mentioned above, you’ll need to choose the right platforms to focus on, and these should be the ones your audience uses most often. In this step, your goal is to find what social media platforms your audience uses and where they want you to be.

It’s also a good idea to check current social media engagement. Which channels currently perform best? Some may see a fair amount of engagement, while others send a lot of traffic directly to your site.

2. Perform competitive analysis

The next step is to perform a competitive analysis. You want to figure out how you stack up against the competition. How much social media engagement do you see vs. them? What types of social content are working (or not working) for your competitors or other industry leaders?

To do this, you can use the Content Exploration Tool inside of your Alexa Advanced Account. Input the websites of competitors into the Content Exploration tool to see which of their articles get the highest engagement.

You can also perform a content gap analysis on your social media sites to see which topics are not getting attention.

3. Build a strategy based on findings

Once you understand your audience, as well as gain some insight into the competition, it’s time to build a clearly defined strategy to help you reach your goals. A strategy is a keystone of social media optimization, but 28% of businesses have said that a lack of strategy is a top barrier from becoming a social business, according to an MIT Sloan Management Review business study.

4. Execute on that strategy

A strategy is nothing without execution. A strategy is executed by a team, and SEO leaders and content marketers need to work closely beside social media and community managers to make the vision a reality. Because social media optimization is so closely aligned with search engine optimization, these teams need to work together towards the same goals, and make sure the message is similar on every channel. When a brand posts on Instagram, they can direct followers to a blog post or an in-depth guide if they want more information.

5. Analyze results and adjust accordingly

Once the strategy has been executed on, results should be analyzed and adjustments should be made. In your initial strategy, outline how often you’ll check in on the results. That way, you won’t find yourself guessing when the right time is to weigh in.

Social Media Optimization Tools

You’ll need the right social media optimization tools to help make this a reality. Thankfully, there are a number of tools out there that can help you on your social media optimization journey. Here are a few that might be able to help.

• Social media scheduling services, like Buffer, MeetEdgar, Sprout Social, and Later
• Search, social media, and audience research tools, like Alexa
• Marketing automation tools, like Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce
• Image creation tools, like Canva and PicMonkey