Social Media Optimisation: The New SEO?
Online trends with consumers and business have continually been moving toward the social media way of life. We now see more and more people using social media sites than ever before which provides a large opportunity for companies to reach their target consumers. Currently strategies in the Social Media Marketing area have not been utilised fully by many businesses.
The term Social Media Optimisation was coined back in 2006 when it was seen that there was an increasing opportunity to reach consumers through social media means and optimise the content that is presented to them. For the past 5 years we have seen the exponential growth of this area of the internet with the dominance of some big players such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
SMO, SEO or Both?
Many people are saying that Social Media Optimisation will see the end of SEO, but we are seeing that it is just another element to a successful online marketing campaign. The effects of a well planned and implemented SMO strategy will in turn be that you will gain excellent SEO benefits.
The internet marketer that coined the term SMO has said that there are factors that are important in quality Social Media Optimisation such as:
- Creating relevant content that is able to be shared to the customer
- Making it easy to share the content with consumers
- Continually communicate with and reward your readers and;
- Encourage them to use your ideas and content to share with others
This use of optimisation is more than just getting your content out to the world for customers to read, it's also integrated into maintaining an online reputation, building a brand, sustaining customer relationship management and providing other high quality external sources linking back to one website.
Social Media - The Big Three
Facebook has been the biggest player in the social media arena in the last few years. It has grown exponentially since its development and is the most used social media in the world. In terms of Social Media Optimisation, Facebook provides you with the ability to create your own content with your own page and share it with a very targeted selection of consumers that can be segmented easily. It is a very streamlined medium to communicate effectively with the people you want to reach while building a strong brand name in the B2C market.
The integration of Bing search and Facebook recently has seen that the combination of social and search results will place even more importance on communicating and creating a presence in the online social scene.
Pepsi introduced an extensive Facebook social media campaign through the Dear Mr. President campaign. Pepsi asked their consumers to interact with the brand through social media, specifically Youtube and Facebook, by uploading their Dear Mr President ideas in the election of Barack Obama. The idea was that Pepsi provided an open line to the Whitehouse for people to communicate with the government. The campaign saw an integration of social media and a 'Refresh Everything' website and gained results of 175,000 new Facebook friends, over 6 Million unique visitors, 700 video submissions and 100,000 text submissions interacting with the brand.
Twitter is a relatively new online socialite but has recently estimated to have 2.5 million users tweeting. This type of medium has aligned it self slightly different to that of Facebook, they have taken the idea of a 'Status Update' and turned into a world wide communication channel that provides viewers with practically live updates in a multitude of different categories from business to celebrities.
In terms of Social Media Optimisation, Twitter allows businesses to gather a following of customers or fans and market to them with relevant up to date content and links back to the company's website. This social media allows you to provide vital information to the followers made up of your target consumers that you have built up, about new products, services or news within your company. Keeping this content consistent with your website content will provide good overall optimisation.
BBGeeks saw the benefits gained from a Twitter campaign by communicating with their customers. They implemented consistent and relevant content to be written for tweeting out to their followers which provided great optimisation, an increase of over 500 social media followers and hundreds of unique visitors driven to their website each month.
LinkedIn is a social media more targeted towards the B2B industry. It was considered to have the fastest growth trends in Australia in 2009/10 with an increase of 99 percent of unique audience numbers. This medium is designed to allow extensive networking in the employment and business sector. It is a social network that truly shows the power of the six degrees of separation.
In a business SMO sense creating a company profile and building up your following of target consumers then allows you to create relevant optimised content and another highly ranked link back to your website. It allows companies access to over 80 million users worldwide with 1.5 million of these being high level executives and 1.3 million small business owners.
Aspedia's Approach
As can be seen from the results listed above, a Social Media Optimisation campaign can be a very effective means of building your brand. However it needs to be approached in an integrated way as it is only as good as your overall online marketing strategy, website structure and content. Basic SEO and SEM techniques are vital to driving traffic to your business's site, SMO just provides another new and extremely effective strategy that will build brand awareness, two way communication and in turn positively effect the rest of your overall marketing strategy.
Aspedia employ a full service Strategic Web Solution for businesses in order to increase awareness of the company, sales and brand recognition in their industry market. We don't just build websites, we take into account all of your business processes and make a solution work for you that can include marketing and web design and development.
Make an enquiry today to build your business to new heights.
