Social media optimisation (SMO) is defined as maximising a website’s potential to be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and social media websites. The benefit of this is to drive awareness and traffic to the website from these communities. A good SMO strategy works well as part of the overall SEO scope of work too, as it can bring an increase in link popularity that will generally help a site perform better in natural rankings.
Many marketers relate social media optimisation to viral marketing and online PR, where people pass the word on via their social networks, social bookmarking, video or photo sites. However, SMO is also a key factor in brand visibility, whether for market saturation or brand protection (getting your brand voice heard clearer and dampening any potential negativity).
At Reform we look at social media optimisation as part of our overall search marketing strategy, but we can also provide SMO strategies customised for your website’s needs. Still, many aspects of SMO are similar to SEO – such as making sure your site has content people will link to, increasing the ease in which users will tag or bookmark your content and becoming a hub of your niche community (based on what your target market sector is).
Key components of SMO include:
Content distribution (such as News)
Social bookmarking
Rich media (video, image, audio)
Blog optimisation
Social networking profiles
Brand visibility
Wiki’s and message boards
Widgets and mash-ups
Along with how to avoid “Negative SMO”
Find out how we can integrate social media optimisation as part of your overall online marketing strategy.