What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?
What are the essential first steps to evaluating your profiles?
The main goal of SMO or social media optimization is to leverage multiple channels and audiences to grow your business’s online presence. As we have found out from this blog post by the Flint Group, there are essential demographics that tend to overpower each platform’s userbase.
Some key takeaways from their article are that platforms like Instagram are for reaching primarily younger audiences anywhere from 18-29-year-olds and has more female users than male users. It is imperative to identify the demographics for each platform as this will help you know where you should invest more of your time and what type of content to produce.
SMO may seem to be a complicated topic, but it’s rather easy. I like to think of SMO in three bullet points to start.
- Have a consistent brand image
- Stick to a content schedule
- Produce engaging content
If you are to do anything in social media, these would be the best places to start. When you build a house or bake a cake, there are a foundation or core ingredients you need to build off. From this foundation, you can spread your wings and let your creativity shine.
A consistent brand image is how a person sees your brand across different platforms and media. If you professionally market yourself on one platform but then contradict yourself on another, this reduces your brand’s image. I don’t want to discourage you from trying new things.
You do, however, need to understand that if your message is being a high tech, data-driven company, it may not be wise to post content about how your office still uses windows vista or something along those lines.
Sticking to a content schedule helps make your job easier. If you are a marketing professional at a company, this is almost required, as that is your job. A business owner that has their hands in multiple activities may not have thought about making a schedule for social media. Often, people treat the platform as a place to the only post when something is happening within the company. I would say that is okay, but how will your audience know that something is happening if you haven’t spent the time to have it grow.
You need to be making efforts to reach new customers and potential partners. Content schedules only take a few days to put together. If you think about how much time in a week, you could save in comparison to not having a plan. You can use a company like Hootsuite to organize and schedule when posts go out. Hootsuite also has a somewhat helpful template for understanding social media and creating a content schedule. I have linked their resource here.
To produce engaging content, think about what’s popular in your industry. Don’t steal content but think about the keywords they are targeting, and if you can produce more in-depth or higher engagement content, then do it. Video is the king of content. People like to see personality shine through in short informational videos. As a content creator, you have to make something worth a prospect or customer’s time.
If your business is brick and mortar or somewhere local to your customers, highlight your space, and find creative topics that involve your surrounding environment. SaaS companies have a different challenge. Software companies can highlight their staff, their company culture, events taking place, corporate social responsibility actions, and so much more.
The other piece of engaging content is to ask your audience to engage with it! Ask a question or have them tell your company their pain points or biggest time wasters. You can use your quality content to see what the market needs.
Now that you have a better idea of how to get started and work on your social campaigns, profiles, and content, try to build up your brand awareness. Promotion is an essential part of any marketing activity. If you don’t tell people where to find the great content you are making, it becomes much harder for them to find it.
Of course, through SEO, you can try to guide them, but as we know from SEO, there is heavy competition. Leverage your network to get more shares, likes, and comments. If you can get enough engagement, your post has the chance to reach viral status within your market segment or beyond.
Take everything you read or hear with a grain of salt. Not everyone can do marketing the same way; that’s why there are multiple strategies and platforms. Log in to your profiles now, draft something up and send it out. You don’t need to sit around overthinking all of the time; you will never get started if you don’t get started.
If you found this helpful in any way, I’d appreciate it if you could share this with your network or a friend. If you didn’t see it useful, send me a message, and I will find another way to help you, whether it is with social media optimization, video ideas, the best free resources for graphic design, or another topic.
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What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?
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