Social Media is surely is one of the most lucrative and rewarding platforms for promoting any website. SMO or Social Media Optimization involves the use of social networking as well as social bookmarking and news sites to make a website more prominent on the web. Below are some pointers which can help you to optimize your SMO efforts.

1. Make your website SMO friendly: The first of the steps towards SMO should be to integrate social media handles/buttons in your website. Facebook “Like Box”, Twitter stream and bookmarking buttons help you to keep your website alive across various social media channels.

2. Promote Shareable Content: Generating shareable content is one of the key requisites of SMO. Shareable content can be anything that is intuitive, essentially relevant to your target audience and has an element of substance or value in it.

3. Update: You need to be aggressive in your approach to make your SMO efforts effective. You must build a rapport with your audience which can only be done by consistently updating your social media handles at regular intervals.

4. Initiate Conversation: Give an ear to what people are talking about. The key thing to understand about social media is that it is for people and people talk. Take your involvement to another level by initiating and participating in conversations across social networking sites.

5. Analyse: You can better direct your SMO efforts if you keep a close watch on the various statistics and use analytics. SMO warrants a targeted and logical approach which can only be done by taking various all information, facts and figures into account.

SMO can help you to catapult your website into widespread recognition. All you need to do is follow a genuine approach to connect with your target audience.

Image courtesy Web Next Solutions

Social media is unanimously hailed as one of the most powerful tools for online marketing in the contemporary landscape. The reason being that the average internet user is much more active and involved than ever before.  SMO or Social Media Optimization is not just another  gambit for Social Media Marketing but rather a prerequisite for the same. In defining terms, SMO is remodeling content and structure of a website to enhance the website’s presence across various social media platforms. The term SMO came in vogue as early as 2006 and its dimensions have undergone many shifts in the past few years.

1.    Optimizing Content: Content is the backbone of any SMO stratagem. While the focus has always been on the linking of content to various social platforms, generating “shareable” content is also critical. “Shareable” content is something that people may actually want to share on their own premise. Generating content that appeals to your key demographics is the main challenge here as SMO is not just about linking; it’s about liking, tweeting, digging, stumbling, pinning and much more.

2.    Making Sharing Easy and Universal: It is not a secret now that tagging and bookmarking tabs are just not enough.

•    As multiple social platforms are on the rise, provisions must be made to hoist your content across each of them. Various social media buttons must be incorporated with your website to facilitate ready sharing of your content.

•    There are various channels which can help your content traverse the web and ultimately bring more visitors to your site. Video sharing sites and document sharing sites like Slideshare, Scribd can increase the accessibility of your content.

3.    Engage: SMO only works if it triggers a genuine discourse among the audience. The key here is to encourage your audience to propagate your content.

•    Rewarding people for sharing your content is a viable option but it is essential to ensure that your content is propagated in the right channels.

•    Creating social media handles such as Facebook pages is almost a given. But the need is to be proactive on these handles and readily addressing each and every feedback.

•    Banking on the content based on trending topics is recommended. People’s interest and predilections keep shifting with time. Hence, it is prudent to keep your content in sync with the current and the new.

4.    SEO Integration: SMO ultimately is aimed at getting more and more unique visitors to your website but sadly it cannot work in seclusion. Before getting on with SMO, it is essential to lay down the ground work with a SEO campaign.

5.    Going Viral: For new websites, a viral campaign can get the ball rolling. Your overall SMO strategy must accommodate some viral campaigns as social media is especially conducive to viral phenomena.

6.    Gaming: Social Media Gaming is the new element added to the mix of SMO. Games of the likes of Farmville, Mafia Wars generate high user involvement as well as user interaction. Apparently, they also serve as nifty tools to gain brand association and building brand image.

The potential of Social Media Optimization is beyond limits as it presents a host of opportunities and an ample scope for innovation and creativity. SMO has emerged as one of the major tools in the marketing mix as it enables to capture the attention of the key demographics on favorable terms while propagating a more credible message.

The controversy about a proper way to sell through social media still lingers. Investments and gestation are other concerns in social media advertising/marketing/sales. Despite all the hype about social media as an emerging sales strategy, it must be by-hearted by all the social media supporters that social media will always remain a “strategy”. To put it in the simplest words, social media is not a typical tool as a direct sales channel.

Without powerful content the foundation of social media is weak and fragile. However, what is sanguine about social media is its irreplaceable value as a communication tool. It is also one of the strongest potential sales channels to argue about. The main objective of content as a sales tool is to nurture the needs, wants and desires of customers. Social Media is a bridge or rather a platform through which content reaches the masses as a driver of sales. It is a way of interacting with potential as well as current customers to keep them in the loop.

“Awareness” is at the heart of communication through content; and so is “attraction”. A fine balance in the amount of factual and creative information is vital for creating powerful content, which sells. The purpose of content is to spread awareness about you, your brand, your products and your services; and, to do it a manner that attracts as well as retains audience. Content creation should be then viewed as an opportunity to interact and engage with masses.

Social media teaches a very important lesson in marketing. It does not put the cart before the horse. Due to the advent of social media as a marketing strategy, marketing gurus have started believing that it is wiser to build and engage an audience for your brand, rather than deciding to win an audience post framing the product strategy.

Social Media Optimization is the mantra in new-age marketing. To further your marketing campaign on the global virtual platform, the correct keyword is all that you need. SMO works its best when web users use certain phrases and keywords to fuel their searches. The words entered, are not mere phrases of the content designed for the specific web page, but are words that help place the website on a ranking scale on search engines. In this case, the social media operative must encode the content with the appropriate words to return maximum search results.

The Right Jargon

The content designer has to have the foresight to understand that the medium of delivering the content should be accessible to all, in terms of readability and comprehension. Thus he cannot choose to bombard the text with heavy-sounding words to garner aesthetic language appeal. The vocabulary needs to be simple and wound in a jargon that is understood by a wider audience. When it comes to reading content online, people would rather look at interactive elements like pictures, videos and graphics than read volumes of uninteresting text. Keeping it short and simple is the net idea to grasp. Short sentences using active voice and employing grammar in meticulous accuracy is what makes for a winning copy.

The Elusive Keyword

The concept of the elusive keyword arises from the intricate searching process. When a keyword is entered into a search engine website, it looks for similar content online, containing the relevant terms. The user is then redirected to the resulting page which might satisfy the query or might lead to further searches. Searching trends show that the most effective search results are the ones displayed as top 5 results in a listing. People rarely choose to look beyond the first five results to further their query. To be able to feature in the to           p 5 listings, the content needs to be optimized to achieve these results.

Getting it Right for SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the tool that makes or breaks your website on the virtual platform. When a mere word can shape or destroy your establishment, pulling out all stops to coin the right one will steer you clear of all hurdles.

The business world is going gaga about social media and every new concept in it that promises a revolution. It is a time when if you exist then it must be because of social media. Could there be something wrong with a thing like social media, which is responsible for giving so many businesses an identity? Is it all a good thing or does it have its share of grey shades too? Let us explore.

Even though the advantages of social media are far more than its disadvantages, it is always better to know both the sides of the coin well. Knowing the below mentioned disadvantages will only help you have a better control over your social media processes:

• “It’s Free” is just a strategy: The social media sites my offer you free registration, but everything beyond that has a cost attached to it. Once you have signed-up, you will need to work on developing strategies for attracting people and then retaining them. Coming up with ideas (a lot of them), means added cost and time investment
• It’s Risky:  Businesses will agree that a larger audience does not always bring positive results. It is also about increased chances of negative feedback. And, since we are talking “social media” the chances of getting negative feedback increase manifold.
• Fraud Makes It More Risky: Social media is full of fraudulent people and fraudulent activities. It is very important that you monitor your social media activities regularly, even if you are not taking any third-party help to handle your twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ or LinkedIn.
• It Means More Competition: Unlike what it is considered, social media is really tough. Social media is a very competitive platform. It is not just about running an account but about continuous interaction with parties and keeping them engaged. Because almost everybody is “going social” it becomes extremely tough to emerge as a leader.
• It Doesn’t Promise ROI in Initial Business Stages: The gestation period is higher in case you are selling your products and services online. This basically boils down to the fact that there is no surety of returns in short-term.

By this blog we are in no way steering you towards becoming “anti”-social media. We also do not want you to unfriend your Facebook account. The drawbacks only indicate that you be more careful with your approach towards social media henceforth.

Remember the uninformed and surprising entry of the Facebook Timeline? A number of us did not like the very idea of it, and its usage was definitely not in question. Many of my online friends were completely against it and voiced their criticism against the time-line feature pretty openly. Discussions about the time-line that led to unfair opinions against Zuckerberg and his declining sense of design were so common that I doubt if an unintended viral may not have affected  the opinion of even those who would have liked to give a thumbs-up (read: like) to the time-line feature.

You may or may not be comfortable with the timeline settings for now but what matters is if you have switched to it then it is indeed good for you. I have a silly habit of searching for things that seem disconcerting. The timeline feature in particular was for example one of the many ‘not-so-important-yet-on-my-mind’ things that undoubtedly was something that I wanted to know more about. Why so much of a brouhaha over something that was only a part of the virtual world? Why is everyone discussing it? Actually, no one was really discussing it. EVERYBODY WAS CRITIQUING. So, I took to studying the timeline and to my surprise what seemed useless for a complete bundle of goodies. I now can’t think of another way of great online marketing.

Many businesses as of present have switched to the timeline feature but haven’t been able to figure out how to benefit from it. In a market that is inexorably focused on social media, the Facebook timeline has given businesses some extremely simple ways of getting ahead with online marketing.

Advantage Cover Photo

The cover photo becomes an evident part of your Facebook profile once you have agreed to use the timeline. Inarguably, this is the most important feature of the timeline also as it a strategically thought adding that helps businesses to improve the visual-designs of their companies. This is the place where you communicate with the world in pictures. This is where on-line marketing is at its active most level. Put a cover photo that draws attention and captures the essence of your business. Be creative, take it seriously and the timeline will come alive, acting as a salesman for your business.

A Tryst at the Template

 Many of us may not know that it’s not just the look that has changed but so has the purpose and intent. Facebook timeline allows a lot more interaction and rendezvous than the earlier version did. You can make use of the template/body at the advantage of online marketing. Highlight items on your page, feature stories, and pin to other websites for a full-fledged online marketing experience. And, then there is a bar to the right-side just below the cover photo which contains four boxes labelled pictures, maps, notes, etc. You can intelligently customize these boxes to display the products, brochures and content of the company.

Knowing the Admin Panel

 No one paid attention to this, right? Well, the admin panel which is a useful part of the timeline is a feature that monitors all the activity that is taking place on your business page. There is also an “Insight Box” that is helpful to convert the user data into a statistical and/or graphical form. This helps you analyze your popularity and reach towards the World Wide Web audience.

The Kolaveri Di about the Timeline took some time to settle but its now time you start benefiting from the well-planned strategy.

A certain Tulip Garden restaurant decides to revamp their menu to attract vegan customers. Word of mouth – being the less effective method in the small community that it was- the business suffered due to lack of proper marketing strategies. So the restaurant put up an interactive game on their website akin to Farmville on Facebook in which the player grew their own produce and made their own Garden burgers. The game also provided opportunities to be able to find hidden free burger vouchers, to enjoy the same, in real at the restaurant. The links were shared on Facebook and Twitter. Soon the game became viral, attracting almost 500 retweets and over 100 shares on Facebook. Their business made most of the situation and the average vegan, found a perfect BBQ styled vegan burger within a stone’s throw.

We are living in the age of the “sharing” economy, where social media optimization (SMO), one of the many methods, is used as leverage to market products and services. In the world, where grabbing eyeballs is better than delivering lackluster information ; where ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ are the rule of the land, social media marketers must up their game in order to be in the proverbial spotlight. Like a dress on Etsy? Share it with your friends on Facebook, Tweet it! Stumble it! Digg it! Your friends can discover the link in their notifications, and voila! more traffic redirected to Etsy. Social media is an indispensable tool for growing businesses, who want their followers to discover, consume and engage with their content effectively. And to that end, the content strategy must be rich and should allow the recipients to coherently convert from content to conversation, from conversation to relationships with the brand or company, from relationships to potential businesses, and from businesses it to ROI. To achieve this SMO must centre on generating dialogue, influencing collaboration, effective segmentation, targeting, and focus on personalized customer attention. At the end of the day social media marketing requires you to be socially active virtually. Web users no longer look for information with the sole expectation of achieving just results. They wish to interact, connect with the results before they form their opinions. They visit pages that their friends recommend and click on shared links. With this degree of personalization the brand needs to come across as real to the consumer. In this regard specific keywords and links is the new moolah vending strategy for SMO.

Thus when a searcher brings forth a query on a search engine, the result is displayed along with matching ads that redirect him to further resources on other websites. In a world of social media marketing strategies lost – Content is the newfound ‘Holy Grail’.

A recent study conducted by Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life Project had some interesting results to show. It claimed that search and email were among the most popular activities online. The exact numbers shown by the study will be talked about later, but let’s focus on how this result affects the marketing maxims that people have long held holy. For one, it dispels the popular myth that social media optimization is your best bet as an online marketer. Meanwhile, those who are religiously engaged in tipping the search engine scales to their favour can breathe a sigh of relief: SEO still reigns supreme in online marketing.

The guys at Pew seem to have done their homework. Tracking online activities of adults since the past 10 years, they come up with some numbers that might rearrange the priorities of online marketers. Coming to the numbers themselves:

1. Using search engines and reading emails tops the list at a dominating 92 percent,
2. Reading online news gets the silver at 76 percent,
3. Online purchases occupy 71 percent,
4. Bringing up the rear is social networking, which is placed at a miserable 65 percent.

An interesting point arises here: Although the rise and rise of social networking sites has heralded a phenomenal growth of SMO activities to raise brand visibility and attract traffic, it looks like sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. have not yet managed to consolidate their hold over all demographics. It seems to be more cluster-oriented, really. Au contraire, search engines and email have consistently attracted a sizeable chunk of followers from just about every strata possible.

Does that mean that a change is in order? Should we, for the matter of debate, start paying more attention to email marketing in our campaigns, something that’s widely regarded as the ignored cousin of SEO and SMO? Remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: this study is sure to get online marketers rethinking their strategies.

The stage is set. The weapons have been polished and the shields are clanging with anticipation. Social networking el supremo Facebook faces off against search engine colossal Google’s throwback, Google Plus. At first glance, it looks like a regular David vs Goliath. 500 million users against a measly 20 million. But the numbers only tell you so much. Delving deeper, one can see many reasons why Google Plus has more than a few aces in the hole.

The biggest advantage that Google Plus has over Facebook is that it has the direct backing of the big daddy of all the search engines, Google. A classic case of SEO meets SMO, if there ever was one. It has been all but openly announced that Google will be heavily leaning on rewarding Google Plus users with higher rankings on its search engine page. And sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can’t do much more than shaking their fists in frustration. That is, unless they (the latter two) don’t end up as dinner for Google’s massive buying spree.

Another reason why Google Plus has become a force to be reckoned with is the revolutionary social media tools it offers to its users. The ‘+1’ button has already trumped Facebook’s likes, the privacy features offered by Plus are aeons ahead of anything Facebook has to offer, and the Circles are being widely acknowledged as the ‘Holy $#!*’ idea of the decade. 10 million users within the first few weeks will nod happily along to that.

Talking White Hat SMO, Google Plus has taken pains to ensure that its users get all the brownie points to promote their websites, provided it’s legit. Website integration with APIs, +1 Button Syndication and a whole new level of networking gives Google Plus ample leverage when it comes to SEO building. Also, Google’s announcement that its +1 button carries a heavy impact over a site’s SEO rankings carries a veiled threat: If SMO for Google Plus is not on your site’s daily calendar, expect a cold shoulder from Google’s crawlies.

Bottom line is, as someone who is actively engaged in SEO and SMO to bump up site rankings, you simply cannot afford to overlook Google Plus anymore. Case closed.