Module 7: Social Media Optimization & Marketing
Social media optimization (SMO) is the use of a number of outlets and communities to generate publicity to increase the awareness of a product, service brand or event. Types of social media social news and bookmarking sites, as well as social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, video sharing websites and blogging sites.
SMO is similar to search engine optimization, in that the goal is to generate web traffic and to a site and increase awareness for a website. In general, social media optimization refers to optimizing a website and its content to encourage more users to use and share links to the website across social media and networking sites.
The goal of SMO is to strategically create interesting online content, ranging from well-written text to eye-catching digital photos or video clips that encourages and entices people to engage with a website and then share this content, via its web link, with their social media contacts and friends. Common examples of social media engagement are “liking and commenting on posts, retweeting, embedding, sharing, and promoting content”. Social media optimization is also an effective way of implementing online reputation management (ORM), meaning that if someone posts bad reviews of a business, an SMO strategy can ensure that the negative feedback is not the first link to come up in a list of search engine results.
In the 2010s, with social media sites overtaking TV as a source for news for young people, news organizations have become increasingly reliant on social media platforms for generating web traffic.
As search engines are increasingly utilizing the recommendations of users of social networks such as Reddit, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ to rank pages in the search engine result pages.
Social media optimization is in many ways connected to the technique of viral marketing or “viral seeding” where word of mouth is created through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. An effective SMO campaign can harness the power of viral marketing; for example, 80% of activity on Pinterest is generated through “repinning.”
Social media optimization is not limited to marketing and brand building. Increasingly, smart businesses are integrating social media participation as part of their knowledge management strategy (i.e., product/service development, recruiting, employee engagement and turnover, brand building, customer satisfaction and relations, business development and more).
Facebook has in recent years become a popular channel for advertising, alongside traditional forms such as television, radio, and print. With over 1 billion active users, and 50% of those users logging into their accounts every day it is an important communication platform that businesses can utilize and optimize to promote their brand and drive traffic to their websites. There are three commonly used strategies to increase advertising reach on Facebook.
Almost half of the world’s small businesses use social media marketing product of some sort. This demonstrates the impact that social media has had on the current digital marketing era.