In today's digital world, an online presence is essential if you want to make a name for yourself and win market share. Over the past fifteen years, social media have played a key role in developing online awareness. But to be visible, you need to adopt the right strategy. This is known as SMO.
What is it all about? How does it work? Find out more about this essential digital marketing strategy.
What is SMO?
SMO (Social Media Optimization) consists of making your brand known through the various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). To do this, companies use both natural and paid search campaign methods.
There are many advantages to this strategy:
- Improving visibility: social networks are now essential if you want to be visible to the general public.
- Increasing website traffic: traffic from social networks can be redirected to the brand’s website. This is where the brand offers its products and services.
- Increase sales: as traffic is generated to the website, the company can multiply its sales by applying the right SMO strategy.
- Improve its e-reputation: social networks facilitate direct interaction with users. This makes it possible to generate a real community and improve the commitment of your target audience to your brand.
- Develop your brand image: by communicating your values, specific characteristics, etc., you can help your brand to stand out from the crowd. This is all the more interesting as more and more consumers are buying a product for the brand.
Good to know: SMO, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEA (Search Engine Advertising) together make up SEM (search engine marketing).
How can you successfully implement your SMO strategy?
To develop your visibility via social networks, you need to follow a few best practices.
Regularity
Like search engines, social networks are based on an algorithm. This algorithm values the quality of the content in relation to the target audience, but also, and above all, regularity. So you need to publish content very frequently. Even on a daily basis to optimise results.
There’s no point in publishing 20 posts on the same day, then nothing else for 1 month. Instead, publish 1 post every 2 days (or every day).
Sharing content
SMO strategies often go hand in hand with SEO and SEA strategies. The aim of these strategies is to improve the visibility of a website on search engines.
To gain visibility, you need to be present everywhere (on Google, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, etc.), wherever relevant. Share buttons are used to distribute content across different channels.
Content strategy
It is vital to develop a content strategy in line with your objectives. To do this, you need to define :
- The frequency of publication ;
- The communication channels to be used;
- The editorial calendar;
- The editorial line;
- The budget for advertising campaigns;
- Targeted keywords;
- etc.
And don’t forget to monitor the indicators to optimise your campaign.
But to implement an effective SMO strategy, you need to master your customer knowledge.
Customer knowledge at the heart of SMO strategies
To increase visibility and optimise your social networking campaigns, it’s vital to get to know your ideal customer better. This makes it possible to :
- Choose the right communication channel: companies can choose between LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat and ….. But it’s often difficult to be present everywhere (at the risk of increasing your workload considerably). So it’s vital to select the most relevant communication channels.
- To do this, you need to know where your target audience is.
Adapting your content: this means offering content that interests your target audience. - But how do you find out? There are several ways: Analytics data can be used to identify the content that receives the most likes, comments and other interactions.
- But it is also possible to ask questions directly to your audience or to carry out surveys.
- Publish at the right time: in addition to the right content, there are certain times of day when you can reach a wider audience.
- Companies therefore need to identify the times when their target audience is online.
For all these reasons, the success of an SMO strategy is based above all on knowing your audience. To this end, companies have a wealth of data at their disposal. These include the statistics tabs on social networks, other marketing tools (such as CRM), and feedback from sales staff in the field or from customer services.
Things to remember
- SMO enables organisations to improve their visibility on social networks.
- To implement an effective strategy, you need to publish regularly, share content, define the right channel, etc.
- Above all, companies need to optimise their customer knowledge in order to raise their profile on social media.
