After your website has been thoroughly Search Engine Optimized, your organization should take a serious look at hiring a Social Media Optimization Specialist to optimize your presence on the Internet - beyond your own website.
Through our division, PROsocialmedia, we offer a full range of SMO services - from strategy to setup/training of social media channels, to deep research of web influencers through to ongoing metrics reporting.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a critical way to complement and augment the SEO work that has helped your website get found online. Now you can focus on getting connected and talked about online… all of it leading to the end-game: getting sales/leads!
Business Benefits of Social Media Optimization
The business benefits of SMO for your company include:
- Increasing the number of sites that link to your site, thereby improving your page rank by Google and the other major search engines. (Link building is a key component of SEO.)
- Managing your online reputation: joining and monitoring the conversation in blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc. to see what is being said about your products/services, and addressing any problems upfront.
- Building a loyal following that advocates your brand and carries your message virally across the Internet.
- Testing out new product/service concepts on real-time, free focus groups in cyberspace!
Corporate SMO Strategy
BEFORE you dive into Twittering, blogging, Facebooking, etc, it is vital that you align your Social Media Optimization Strategy with your business objectives.
Our team partners closely with your key stakeholders - management, your marketing department, any other vendors, online or offline if involved - to make sure your social media activity is appropriate, ethical and practical.
- Review of your organizational objectives and goals, and your target market(s).
- Align these objectives with your Social Media Strategy.
- Integrate your Social Media Strategy with your SEO and digital and offline PR efforts.
- Get buy-in at the executive management level.
- Create a clear corporate ethics and branding policy on how employees will engage in social media.
- Review how your main competitors play in the social media space; note best practices.
- Ensure sufficient resources (employee time) are available to manage the social media profiles and monitor the online conversations.
Social Media Education and Training
A big piece of what we do in the area of Social Media Optimization is teaching the client what exactly Social Media is, how to set up and manage profiles/accounts/channels of various social media, how to participate successfully and how to reach out to Web influencers in your subject area.
Depending on the suitability re: their business objectives/target market, we teach organizations how to:
- Blog regularly, and with SEO best practices, to grow brand loyalty, boost page ranking and increase traffic.
- Use instant-messaging/micro-blogging platform to convey real-time messages (particularly useful for crisis communication strategies)
- Leverage conversations in grassroots communities.
- Create your own grassroots group.
- Disseminate digital content through photo-sharing and video-sharing sites.
- Monitor and join the conversation on forums/chat rooms.
- Use wikis for employee collaboration.
- Create viral marketing within virtual worlds.
- Use Twitter for real-time news and views updates, and as crisis communications mode.
- Source potential business partners and new hires via professional networking sites such as LinkedIn.
- Bookmarking links in social-sharing sites and article-voting sites.
- Listen to the public conversations about your brand, related issues in forums/message boards.
- Podcast or Webcast your messages effectively; get found on iTunes, PodcastAlley.
- Custom-develop Widgets to be spread across other websites
- Many others SMO ideas…
Web Influencer Outreach
It is not enough to be blogging, social networking, Twittering, etc. yourself… you need to know what your fellows are saying, watching, voting on, sharing.
For this key component of your SMO Strategy, our experienced researchers identify the main “web influencers” in your spheres of interest - across all social media channels. So, the bloggers with big readership, the videographers who get a few 100,000 views, the forum moderator with 10 years in the field, the online journalists of record, etc.
At PROsocialmedia, we develop a specific Outreach Plan for each Web influencer identified, so your staff, trained by us, can reach out to them to forge ongoing relationships.
Social Media Metrics
While gathering metrics in Social Media Optimization work is not as straightforward as for SEO (see where the client’s web pages rank in Google results), there are definitely ways to track how your company is doing in online conversations.
For example, our analysts at PROsocialmedia look at what the ’share of conversation’ is for your brand, and the tone of that conversation (pro, neg, neutral) as well as count up the number of video downloads, comments left on videos and photos, subscribers to RSS feeds, comments left on blogs, number of followers on Twitter, etc.
What SMO Metrics have in common with SEO Metrics is examination of the endgame - that is the effect of the social media, and search engine results, efforts on Site Traffic > Lead Generation > Sales.
Our divisions, PROsocialmedia and writingSEO both include key information about traffic patterns - unique visitors, average time on site, bounce rate, exit/entry pages, etc. - as part of our Metrics Package with biweekly reporting.
Free Consultation on PROsocialmedia Services
To book your initial, free consultation about any or all of these SMO service modules, please email or phone (905) 308-0038.
