You may have heard of Search Engine Optimisation (learn more about SEO) but SMO is slightly different.

SMO is fully leveraging the marketing potential of social media channels.

What does this mean for you?

Due to their individualised and localised preferences, social media sites such as Facebook allow you to be creative and interactive with your marketing activities.

E.g. You could produce a short video that is topical to your business and perceived by others as genuinely useful information, and post this on your You Tube channel, in your Facebook group and tweet about it etc.

Including a link back to a landing page on your website during such SMO activity, assists with SEO by driving traffic. Hence, SMO can be part of an effective overall SEO strategy.

In order to fully utilise SMO and provide your business with the best results possible, we’ve pulled together a few tip on ‘best practices’. These include:

* Be Participative - Web prospects like to participate in communities. You can encourage them to do this on your web pages, blogs and social media outlets through posting compelling content and providing advice that addresses genuine concerns.

* Converse instead of advertising – The average person will view 3,000 advertisements in one day, which leads to overload therefore in order to reach out to consumers, engaging web conversations should be utilised. Being able to have ‘personalised’ conversations with your customers and respond to customer complaints in real time also helps to build your brand.

* Be Transparent - Trust is important when communicating with online consumers. Being participative, sincere, open and 100% accurate and truthful is extremely important.

* Belong to Communities – Social media thrives on the feelings of community belongingness fostered by web conversations on mutual interest and niche-communications that are based on typical content. SMO is a great way to utilise social media to bond people with similar preferences and tastes to provide helpful advice on various products and services.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.