The main aim of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to bring greater visibility to your business webpage by achieving higher search engine rankings. Social Media is now a huge part of the online world and with Facebook alone having ~1.8 billion users, the importance of marketing thru these social media platforms cannot be over emphasized. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is part of the larger SEO techniques whereby it ensures effective and widespread visibility to real time potential customers
Why so you need SMO?
Social Media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Squidoo, Blogger, Hubpages, Digg, or Delicious, etc.) provide an excellent opportunity to organizations to interact directly with their end users, to get to know their reviews and to proto-type their products at virtually no cost by getting reviews and testimonials. If managed correctly, positive comments, direct interaction and regular updates can target a wider audience and can also bring the users closer to the brand at a more personal level. Satisfied and comfortable users are itself a source of positive marketing and that too at almost no monetary cost.
How to benefit from SMO?
Content sharing directly from the website or blog, photo sharing, launching of social events, blogging, commenting, initiating discussion groups, status updates, messaging etc. are some of the social media methods that can be used to market your business. SMO attracts online, yet organic, traffic from sources other than the search engines and due to quality of backlinking it also improves the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings thus providing two benefits at the same time. Although effective SMO requires quite a lot of dedication however the commitment is well rewarded by the positive bench marking and free publicity.
Network and Connect
Effective SMO allows your business to connect with your competition and consumers providing you real time insight of the challenges you might be facing. It also allows others to share and spread your content providing you with word-of-mouth marketing. Options like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, bookmarks, tagging and sharing enable your website and social profile to generate qualitative links and increased traffic. Social Media and Search Engines are therefore essentially interlinked with each other. Higher ranking in one automatically raises your PageRank in the other.
SMO requires consistency and coupled with features of SEO, we can help alleviate your business by use of the right keywords both on your social media profile and webpage, by backlinking both, by increasing your social profile and thus making your business more and more available and by branding your business. Social media is a great asset with a huge business potential. Utilize it effectively and intelligently.
