Social Media Optimisation (SMO) uses social media to get you listed on the first pages of Google for your chosen search terms more than once.  Here is an example.

Say you have a web page that is fully optimised for the term “Cokin Filters” .  That page will appear on the Google search results pages precisly once.  Now, if you were to write an article about optical filters that is fully optimised for the search term “Cokin Filters” and have a hyperlink to your web page then you have two chances to be on that first search results page.  Somebody reads your article and decides that they like so they add it to their social bookmarking account.  Now you have 3 chances to be on the first page.  And so it goes on.  The more people that read your articles, blogs and posts the more chances you have to be on the first results pages.

There is a significant by-product from this activity and that is that the more articles, blogs and posts there are out there about your articles, blogs, posts and your web page the better chance your web page has of gaining a high ranking in Google.  This is because Google will see your page as being not only relevant but also popular.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is not the same as Social Media Marketing (SMM) although there are many similarities.  SMO uses the social networks and bookmarking sites to point search engines to your Internet presence whereas SMM is marketing directly to the users of online social networks.

Example of SMM

The big players have been using the social networks for marketing for some time now and the most common and well known technique that they use is viral marketing, using a short video clip to entertain the viewer in the hop that they will pass this on to their friends and colleagues.  This used to work very well for well known brands but the smaller, less well known brands found it difficult to break in to this type of brand promotion.

Now SMO

Then along came Social Media Optimisation.  A method of getting more than one entry on the search engine results pages for your chosen keywords or phrases.  Most of the techniques used can be done easily yourself, but be warned, for a campaign to be effective it needs to be relevant, recent, consistent and played out over a long period.  Whilst you are doing your own SMO, who is running your business?

The first thing that you need to know about SMO is that it requires content.  Search engines love good content, no matter what it is, and they need to be able to find the content that you so carefully produced.  This content can be text, image or video based and it needs to engage the reader or viewer so that they help you with your campaign by telling all of their friends about it by way of the online social networks.  You can get the ball rolling yourself by using social bookmarking sites to help search engines find your content and serve it up on their results pages.  Don’t forget that your content should always point people to your business Internet presence.

I say “Internet presence” rather than “website” because you do not need to have a website to have an Internet presence.  You could use only Blogs, videos on YouTube or a Facebook or LinkedIn profile.  All of these are much easier and cheaper to get hold of and maintain than websites and all of them are already on the social networks.

Case Study

Recently, I saw a Facebook post from an Internet only organisation saying that they need more traffic to their website.  So I had a look at their website and their online presence in general.  Apart from serious marketing on Facebook, they did not appear to have much in the way of other SMO or SEO to go with their campaign and so I contacted them and offered to help.  They declined my offer saying that they had the online side covered and that off-line was more important in Luxembourg for some reason.  They have made one of the basic mistakes that people who do it themselves make – they cover only one network and hammer it to death.

For SMO to work you need to spread yourself much wider than one network as well as employ good SEO to all of your content.

People who use social networks do not respond to advertising so why optimise anything for them?  The simple answer is that people who use social networks are having a conversation whilst collecting information that interests them.  If you take part in the conversation and provide interesting information then you are going to become more popular on these networks.

Social Media Optimisation is optimising your social media content so that it can be found by search engines – yes, people still use search engines to find things on the Internet!

Posts to this blog will be on subjects about using social media and social media optimisation to enhance your business and brand so that you get more customers.