Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for websites has been fine tuned with numerous companies now devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO on organic search listings. While there is power in SEO, there is a new offering that businesses are demanding – Social Media Marketing Optimisation (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimise a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines.
Social media marketing optimisation encompasses building your brand, loyalty, customer base and much more. Some of the customised social media marketing optimisation services that we offer include:
- Social networking profile selection and development.
- Relevant blog research.
- Blog commenting and reply campaigns.
- Community outreach programmes.
- Online reputation management, tracking and improvement.
- Online brand loyalty programmes.
- Blogger outreach programmes.
- Online viral video promotional campaigns.
- Overall social media marketing.
- In-house training.
SMO tactics can drive huge numbers of visitors to a website and can also determine whether a start-up, website or idea will succeed or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren’t the only sites that drive traffic any longer.
- Increase your ‘linkability’ – The first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are “static” – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimise a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content.
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but you should also make sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link.
- Reward inbound links – Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings.
- Help your content reach – Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content reach further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
- Encourage the mashup – In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fuelled their growth.
- Be a ‘User Resource’ – Add value to users, including outbound links to areas that could help them with their goals and purposes. Deployed corrected, even if you link to competitors you stand to gain as the communities first source of information finding.
- Reward helpful and valuable users – Often helpful or popular users will be influencers and champions within your social site, devise ways to elevate them buy promoting their works on the homepage.
- Participate – Join the conversation. Don’t forget that social media is a dialogue. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. Participation helps your message spread further and faster.
- Target your audience – If you don’t even know your target audience you are in trouble
- Create content – There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will work.
- Be authentic – The community does not reward fakers.
Two criteria of a successful social media marketing optimisation programme is:
- Engage in a two way conversation with their audience.
- Allow and encourage user generated content.
Social media marketing optimisation made easy
The social media marketplace is large, ever growing and quite complex. Whilst you do not need to partake in all community networks, you do need a sufficient presence.
You should, however, not over stretch yourself – it is better not to commit to being involved that to do something half-hearted.
Jack Marketing Solutions™ can help you devise a strategy to optimise your social media marketing optimisationactivities, train your staff to maintain the presence. We can also track and monitor your social marketing activities, or train your people to do this and report back to you. Contact us today to find out how we can help release your potential.
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