What Does Social Media Optimisation (SMO) Mean?

Social Media might just be the most important marketplace for any business to compete in right now.

It’s a bold statement but it stacks up. The average internet user in the UK spends nearly 2 hours a day on social media and the role of social media in buying decisions just keeps getting stronger with 58% of shoppers in the USA admitting that they had bought products because they saw them on a social platform.

That means it’s well past time for companies to get serious about social media and recognise that you can’t rely on luck to turn browsers into followers or to turn followers into customers. Instead, what you need to achieve these goals is Social Media Optimisation (SMO).

SMO is a digital marketing strategy with three, linked aims:

• Optimising a brand’s online presence for social media, making sure that the website and all online platforms are ripe for sharing and engagement
• Using social media to cut through and connect with key groups of the audience and increasing the brand’s profile with these groups
• Developing that social media relationship and turning those key audience groups into loyal customers 

Done well, SMO should mean you meet your audience where they already are with content and interactions which feel authentically engaging to them.  

But, great content isn’t enough. It is also essential to understand how each individual social platform works so that your content and interactions will rise up through the platform’s algorithm and get in-front of as many of the right eyeballs as possible.

What turns up in your social media feed might sometimes feel random but it is definitely a long way from that. 

The suggestions for content to watch, new people to follow and the ads that are served up are all driven by the algorithm which has been created for that platform. The aim of an algorithm is to keep users engaged and online. To do that they shape how content is filtered, ranked, selected and recommended to users. It’s the algorithm that makes sure that people using the platform see things that keep them interested and keep them scrolling. 

So algorithms are the enemy, right? Well, no, not really. So much content is put up onto social media every day that if there wasn’t a way of filtering and personalising it, all of our experiences of social media would be pretty overwhelming and not much fun.

Think of the algorithms as a bit like personal shoppers, helping to find out what suits us, what makes us happy and, crucially, what might tempt us to get our wallets out.  

Which means a important way to ‘beat the algorithm’ is to do what you were going to do anyway, make great content which is brilliantly targeted to the key audiences for your brand. 

SMO needs to be baked into your organisation’s social media strategy. This is because SMO isn’t just about doing one thing or ticking one box it is about every aspect of your brand.

To put SMO into practice you need to get your ducks in a row and develop your strategic thinking. Even before your first post you need to have:

• A deep-dive into your audience. Including some soul-searching about whether the audience you have is the audience you need for your brand to grow. 
• A clear view of your goals. Not just the number of followers and interactions but the impact you want social media to have on the business
• An oversight of how your competitors are engaged in the social media space
• A review of your website to make sure that it is designed to be shared
• A real understanding of the key social platforms and the content that performs best on them
• Keyword and hashtag research into the words and phrases that your audience are searching for and following

All of this matters because it helps you to determine where you should be engaging with your audience and the types of content you need to focus on producing. It’s not until you have this strategic work locked down that you can start building out your profiles, adding social links to your website and finally, get to creating the content that is going to help your brand hit the stratosphere.

SMO emphasises that creating content and engaging with your audience on social media is an investment and that it takes time and money to do it right. 

To create a thriving social media operation, you need to be at home in the fast-paced, ever changing world of social media and understand how to maximise the impact of each engagement. A successful, optimised campaign will use all the tricks of the trade such as:

• Using Social Media Scheduling Tools to make sure your content hits your audience when they are most responsive
• Partnerships with the influencers who connect best with your audience
• Leaning in to short-form videos as platforms heavily promote this content
• Seeking out and promoting great user-generated content. Evidence is growing that users respond more strongly to messages which feel ‘home-grown’ rather than slick and corporate
• Brilliant analytics so that you can see the impact of each interaction and piece of content and flex your approach if needed

The aim of an SMO campaign is always about a business’ bottom line. It isn’t enough to create brilliant, entertaining content, every interaction and every post must be about building connections with the audience and encouraging them to want to find out more about the brand. 

If a social media strategy isn’t driving traffic through to the business’ website and, ultimately, converting that traffic into profit. Well, it definitely isn’t optimised. 

While SMO isn’t SEO the links are there. The aim of SEO is to drive up traffic to your content, encouraging consumers to see it, and therefore also your brand, as reliable, attractive and worthy of their attention and money.

SEO achieves this by making sure that your content is listed high-up in the results of relevant searches on search-engines. The higher you are in the list of results the more people will visit your content and, hopefully, come to love your brand.

SEO experts have lots of tricks up their sleeves to help companies rise up in the rankings but a key one is to optimise the content on their website. Making sure that it is really relevant, loaded up with all the key words that people will be searching for and that it provides a great experience for the searcher.

While lots of the techniques of SEO are very different to SMO this focus on content and making sure that it meets your users’ needs is an important similarity.

Some excellent (ahem) and award-winning (ahem) companies are also finding ways of bringing the two strategies together. SEO was traditionally seen as just about websites and search engines but Social Chameleon has come to realise that people increasingly look for answers on social media (anyone else here ever looked for celeb gossip on Tik Tok or sink unblocking techniques on YouTube?). 

We are pioneers of  Search First Social Media® and by combining learning from SEO with our award-winning SMO strategies we are showing just how much impact social media can really have on a brand’s bottom line. 

Social Media Optimisation is all about making social media work for your business. 

The importance of social media has never been greater and the opportunity cost of not taking this growing marketplace seriously could be disastrous for your business. Working with an SMO expert will allow your business to strategically deploy social media to increase engagement, grow your business and make your CFO a very happy person.

Social Chameleon understands social media. Our integrated social media strategies will revolutionise your brand’s presence across the social platforms and will unlock the true potential of the social media marketplace for your business.

It is time to optimise your social media. Get in touch with Social Chameleon to find out more.