Social media is used by almost 57% of the world’s population, making it the most crucial and affordable platform where you can tell your brand story effectively and prompt your audience into action.

When it comes to growing your business, most companies understand search engine optimization is a marketing must. Far fewer recognize the elevating potential of social media. Some think that setting up an account on social media platforms is enough, but it doesn’t work like that. And what too often gets overlooked is the awesome superpower of social media optimization (SMO).

Businesses that fail to utilize SMO are making a huge mistake. Studies showed that 50% of companies are struggling with SEO because they are not integrating SMO into their digital marketing strategy. Fortunately, all is not lost because avoiding this error is pretty simple.

Many business and website owners struggle to find the time and manage the content to post on their social media. But taking the time to fine-tune your SMO strategies now can help you strengthen the brand, generate stronger leads, get more visibility in the digital world, and connect with the right audience and community in the long run.

What is SMO in digital marketing?

SMO or Social Media Optimization stands as an ever-growing buzzword in digital marketing today. SMO in digital marketing means it is a concept that harnesses social media networks to grow a business’s online presence and help them achieve its goals.

Do you know that there are approximately 3.499 billion active social media users worldwide, and every user has an average of 7.4 social media accounts? That’s why businesses need to optimize their social media because this will allow their brand to stand out from the crowd. It will be a big help to gain more followers, subscribers, and conversions. Various social media platforms can be utilized by businesses today such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

For this, you need to have a solid social media plan to build a good relationship with your target audience. There are some best practices that you can start working with: Aside from relationships, you can also reduce the total cost of marketing, maximize your SEO approach, and generate more revenue.

Why is Social Media Optimization important?

With SMO, you can ensure a strong web presence for business and establish the Internet authority of the brand. It is a two-way communication where you can not only introduce people to the business but also helps in branding, improving visibility and recall. So why should I spend my resources on SMO?

It helps to increase awareness of a brand, products, and services

Social media creation and optimization will help you ensure a better and stronger online presence for your current and potential audience. More people will know about your business and goals. Never underestimate the power of SMO because it helps social media algorithms understand business, and this can improve your search engine optimization (SEO). A perfect balance of SEO and SMO is important to achieve better rankings on search engines.

Build relationships with current and potential customers

Optimizing your social media accounts helps you to target niche audiences because your platform allows you to position your brand in a way that customers find interesting. With good content, you can start and have actual conversations with your customers on social media – a dream for most brands!

Drive traffic to your website

An optimized social media page can generate more visitors to your website because social media channels allow you to interact with a bigger audience worldwide. When people interact with your social media page and they find your products or services interesting, they will click on your website link and eventually visit your website.

Encourage conversions, sales, and revenue growth

Normally, people use the Internet for surfing but little did you know that if you invest in SMO for your business or brand, you can get conversions that will improve your sales and eventually increase your business revenue.

Improve ranking

SMO affects your search engine rank, and it is not only for social media. Your search engine ranking is enhanced because you apply the best SMO practices and produce quality content. You must have also noticed that sometimes Google ranks social media links at the top position of your search results. Once people visit your social media through search engines and trust your information, Google counts your social media for related queries.

Social Media Optimization Strategies you should try

Here are some examples of SMO strategies that you can use to help your business get found by your potential customers when they search for your products and services online. While there are factors to consider in structuring a blueprint, taking a strategic approach to your social media will significantly improve your marketing performance.

First thing first: You need to ensure that your brand accounts are aligned with your business and its goals. This requires a general audit of your social profiles with an emphasis on branding and marketing messaging.

Optimize your social profiles

In social media page optimization, check if the branding and creative visuals are consistent with

your business’s online presence (logos, fonts, hashtags, taglines, and slogans). Make sure the name of the company is visible on the logo, clear enough to read may it be on mobile or desktop.

Choose a short username that is easily searchable and choose something available on all social networks. Do not forget to include detailed information such as the company’s bio, website, contact number, and email address.

Ensuring these elements are consistent is crucial because this increases brand visibility, and the professional look, and feel—setting your business and website up for success. Aside from this, make sure that your brand details are across all channels, and usernames, and are connected to your website, whether in the footer, sidebar, or at the bottom of your content.

Implement a content strategy

To garner the best results in your SMO, a content strategy is a must. This might be as simple as putting three posts a week, or one post a day. Sticking with your strategy will help increase the visibility not only of your social profiles but also your website and brand. But posting content is not enough, you need to share your content with other platforms or groups, or even run targeted ads.

Focus on external links to your website

Maintaining a large or loyal social following is also crucial and getting these users to leave these social media sites is where the real work comes. Encourage external sites to link to your content because the more diverse links that you get, the higher the authority you build on Google. To do so, it is important to consistently produce and post eye-catching images, videos, and text that will allow your users to find out more. You should also promote your content by sharing it in existing threads and discussion forums.

Keyword Research and Use of Hashtags

Another SMO tactic is to improve your keyword research because surveying the right words will help your content rank on Google. Zoom in on what topics, keywords, and even hashtags your audience uses to find information about your service or product. This will also allow you to choose relevant and popular hashtags that will help build your brand personality and constantly draw people to your business, which will expand your company’s reach and earn new leads.

Reach out to social media influencers

Make sure to establish a connection with industry-relevant social media influencers and tag them in your posts. This way, if they see your posts and like them, they will share them on their platform. As a result, you can garner more followers on your page and boost your brand image.

Track the analytics of your ad campaigns

It is important to track the metrics of each of your business’s social profiles when running ad campaigns. Optimizing your social media profile campaigns will allow you to understand performance more clearly. Do not get complacent with your social media presence because without the right analytics tools, you will fly blind.

Tried and tested SMO tools

You can optimize your productivity by using social media optimization tools that are free to use. There could be many options available out there but narrowing your selection down can be easy. These are user-friendly where you can explore and help create original content. But if you want a social media optimization expert that has first-hand experience in the market needs and trends you can start here.

Facebook Audience Insights

This SMO tool can help you identify people who match your ideal customer profile and as a result, should be a target for your content marketing campaigns. It also helps you reach and attract customers who are more likely to become customers. Facebook Audience Insights will also send you a report that shows your audience’s age range, gender, geography, and even interests. It’s a good tool to use in defining your target audiences and refining your target personas.

Google Analytics

This is a widely used web analytics tool offered by tech giant Google that tracks and reports your website traffic and tests new landing pages that have been converting well. It is also powerful for your SMO especially when you employ linking strategies for increasing site traffic, leads, and sales. According to Google, this tool is used by almost 85.9% of all websites.

Twitter Analytics

With the use of this SMO tool, you can get a real-time analytics platform that tracks retweets, favorites, and follows as well as how far your tweets travel and whom they reach. It also offers personalized timeline insights and company page insights.

Hootsuite

Maintain the social networking accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WordPress, and Google+ in a convenient way with Hootsuite. This SMO tool will help you break down and track the recent trends in social networking sites—settling on quick yet results-oriented choices. There are paid plans with this tool, but they also offer a free plan for small businesses where you can also schedule social media posts in advance.

Buffer

If you’re looking for an all-in-one app that allows you to manage all your pages in a single place Buffer is another good choice. It enables you to schedule posts with all your social media accounts quite simply. It is also designed to collaborate with followers and visitors and additionally offers useful and interactive mobile applications which can be very effective for your social media optimization.

Canva

An SMO tools list wouldn’t be complete without Canva. This is a simple and popular graphic social media optimization tool that offers templates for all kinds of social media networks. It has different types of layouts, fonts, and backgrounds to choose from allowing users to create high-quality images which help in easy content creation.

Hubspot

Hubspot is a social media management software that allows users to create different social media profiles and post different content like videos, blog posts, conversations, podcasts, etc. You can also schedule posts in advance and monitor trending keywords that are relevant to your brand and audience.

The Bottomline

Social media has forever changed the way businesses market to their customers. They can now build stronger and more meaningful relationships with their customers using social media so make sure to establish a genuine network with your audience.

Social Media Marketing Optimization is not as challenging as it sounds but it can be time-consuming and difficult to understand at first. However, it is worthwhile because this has proven to be beneficial for creating reliable brand awareness. SMO is something that businesses should implement and take a strategic approach to put their best foot forward.

The heart of any SMO strategy is customer relations. It’s all about getting users to stay on your social media, letting them get to know you, finding out what sets you apart from competitors, and providing them with an enjoyable and straightforward experience so that they will remain committed to your brand. You can talk to your social media marketing agency and deliberate on how to approach and communicate with your audience on the social platforms you utilize.

So how will you optimize your social media profile? It’s your turn now!