CHANGING TRENDS? The SEO vs SMO Schools of Thought
Online trends today have ceaselessly been leading towards a social media lifestyle. We now observe an ever increasing number of individuals utilizing social media platforms than any time in recent memory, which creates substantial access for organizations to potential customers. Right now the potential of Social Media Marketing has not been used entirely by numerous organizations.
The term Social Media Marketing was coined in 2006 when it was seen that there was an expanding chance to get across to clients through social media and also optimizing the content that is displayed to them.
Many predict that SEO will slowly fade away, replaced by Social Media Optimization, yet we see that it is simply one more component to a holistic online marketing campaign. The impacts of a meticulously planned and actualized SMO strategy will thus also acquire incredible SEO benefits. Internet marketers believe that there are a few components that are key to a quality Social Media Optimization:
- Creating content that is relevant so that it can be shared with the audience
- Making it simple to share the content
- Continually speak with and engage the audience and;
- Encourage the audience to utilize thoughts, content and share it with their peers
This utilization of optimization is more than simply getting the content out into the world for clients to peruse; it’s additionally unified into keeping up a reputation on the web, constructing a brand, sustain client relationship management and giving other brilliant quality external backlinks back to one’s site.
SOCIAL MEDIA — THE BIG THREE
Facebook has been the greatest player in the social media field recently for years now. It has developed exponentially since its inception and is the most active social netowrk on the planet. In regards to Social Media Optimization, Facebook gives individuals and businesses the capacity to make and share content through a page and share it to a target group of users that can be chosen effectively. It is an exceptionally streamlined medium to interact effectively with the target population, while building a solid brand name in the market.
The integration of Facebook and Bing search lately has seen that the mix of social and list items will put significantly more importance on conveying and establishing an online presence in the social sphere.
There have been numerous brands who have used this platform to successfully run campaigns, but one of the more notable ones was the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign by Coca-Cola in 2011. The idea was for customers to be able to customize their bottles of Coke however they wished to and it still is very much popular today. The campaign was rolled out on Facebook in 2011 which resulted in 7% increase in sales and 18 million impressions, with an 870% increase in their Facebook page traffic immediately. It was a total hit.
Twitter is a relatively new online social media platform. However, it has about 320 million active users tweeting. This medium has adjusted itself, unique to that of Facebook; they have implemented the idea of a ‘Status Update’ and transformed into an overall correspondence channel that makes provision for users to experience live updates in a large number of various classifications from celebrities to business.
As regards Social Media Optimization, Twitter permits organizations to assemble a following of clients or fans and market to them with significant up to date content and backlinks to the organization’s site. This social media permits you to give essential data to the followers made up of your target customers that you have informed about new products, services or news involving your organization. Keeping this content aligned with your website content will produce good overall optimization.
Barack Obama was strongly associated with the #YesWeCan campaign during his 2008 campaign, but back then no more than three thousand people used this hashtag on twitter during the three month run-up to the campaign, despite there being about 70 million Obama voters who most likely knew about the slogan. During 2008, Twitter was a new platform and hashtags too were not that popular yet. It was also dubbed as the Facebook Election. But the spike in twitter mentions came during Obama’s Presidential Acceptance Speech.
LinkedIn is a social media platform more focused towards the B2B sector. It was considered to have the quickest development trends with an expansion of 91% of unique audience numbers. This platform is intended to permit broad networking in the work and business sector. It is a social media platform organization that genuinely demonstrates the power of the six degrees of separation.
AND THE WINNER IS . . . .
Social Media Optimization is a very effective way to build awareness, credibility and loyalty towards a brand. However, what has to be kept in mind is that the campaign has to be planned in an integrated manner, keeping the overall Digital Marketing strategy, Website structure and the content relevant. Whereas basic SEO techniques are very important to drive traffic to your website, Social Media Optimization proves a fresh and extremely effective way to engage with your customers and in turn positively affect the overall marketing strategy.
