SMO? More acronyms? Ah, Social Media Optimisation! What’s that?

So what’s this Social Media Optimisation (SMO) all about?

SMO is a relatively new term used for the practice of optimising the content on your website and advertising it via social bookmarking websites (Digg, Delicious etc), blogs, podcasts, social sites (Facebook, Flickr etc), micro-blogs (Twitter), message boards and wikis.

It’s worth noting that as well as promoting your products and services it’s also a great medium for promoting your brand and your customer services.

In order to speak to the widest customer base possible you need to understand the concept of SMO - take the content of your website and amend in such a way that it is more easily linked to, more visible in social media searches and more frequently shared and linked to in relevant posts, blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

How Linkable Is Your Content?

You’ll have pages on your website dedicated to products and services. These pages will provide all of the information fodder that someone interested in your niche will crave but how do you get this to them? A well formatted web page – well written and well structured – is the simplest way to make sure that your content is found and understood by the search engines. You also need to promote your content via social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious and to do this you can simply add the relevant links within your content or provide links to enable visitors to “share this”. So straight away, your well thought out, informative, genuine content is being made viral and your visitors are encouraging others to visit your site, people who’ve been qualified by their friends and peers.

Using Social Media Sites

If you’ve not already got a Facebook or Twitter account then this is easy to arrange. Both of these sites are examples of how you can build a community of people interested in you, your products, your services and/or your ethics. The content and links you create here can be easily shared among those in your community and wider communities. Although these sites are seen by many as a medium for chatting with their friends they actually act as a vehicle for sharing content. And while people in their various groups are chatting among themselves about common interests make sure that somewhere along the line, your products and services get a mention. Word of mouth is a powerful tool especially when exposed to the numbers of people who are using these sites.

Consider Other Viral Formats

Wrap your products and services into different formats but formats that are equally as viral. PDF’s are easy to create and share. Better still, consider video. Provided you don’t have a face better suited to radio, get chatting to the camera about your company. This will provide you with the facility to really big up your products and services. It’s all well and good writing a good blog about a bunch of new products but to watch someone who is genuinely excited by the products, this is far more likely to convince the viewer of the need to follow this through to your website. Plus, creating video’s, publishing them online and sharing them with your communities couldn’t be easier and it’ll increase the number of links back into your site which is important for search engine ranking.

So, you have great products and services and perhaps a great website but you need to spread the word. Optimising your content for social media isn’t complex but there’s an amount of time you need to invest first. When you’re next creating content, consider how you could change this content to make use of the following social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn to name but a few.

Reports show that many companies understand social media but don’t know how to make the best use of it. Make sure you get in there early and begin reaping the benefits of early adoption. But considering the speed at which these things can develop you’ll need to move fast.

Mancala can remove the pain and uncertainty from this and have you up and running in no time. Feel free to give us a call today or email us if you’re shy. We’re happy just to chat about this and help you though the ever increasing minefield of acronyms:)