Social Media Optimization

A perfect combination of Product, Price, Place & Promotion (4P’s) is required for a successful marketing strategy. The explosion in social media networks has brought about revolution in promotion by bringing in a new way of marketing – Social Media Optimization.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the process of social media activity with the intention of attracting unique visitors to your websites. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is one of two online methods of website optimization; the other method is search engine optimization or SEO.

There are two categories of SMO methods:

• Social media features added to the content itself, including: RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos
• Promotional activities in social media aside from the content being promoted, including: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles

Social media’s primary benefit to your promotion strategy is its ability to build relationships and communities between individuals who share same interests and who would not be brought together otherwise except for those interests; in this way, increasing their credibility, building brand and, in time, increase profitability by creating a loyal following.

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:

• Growing brand awareness (a softer value, takes longer to build). Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking)
• Conversion and sales tracking
• Increase e-traffic to your website
• Business development and a broader customer reach
• Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there (see also reputation management)
• Create buzz about events
• Community building platform
• Boost your Sales