A few years ago, social media was popular with individuals for interacting and keeping in touch with family and friends. It wasn’t the norm for businesses to have fan sites and networks online. As a result, companies have allocated their marketing dollars to paid search engine marketing like Google AdWords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve organic search rankings. Since we are aware that search engine optimization is a long-term strategy, it took some companies much longer than others to get search engine rankings even after strategies of aggressive link building and content marketing. This is no longer the case as companies now have the option to include social media strategies in their marketing plan that are based on proven industry results and relevant to their business.
Now companies can allocate resources between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Optimization (SMO) / Social Media Marketing and get results in less time. Optimization has made it easier to apply marketing strategies too.
If you’re a straightforward business type and don’t have the resources to manage profiles and have conversations with fans, SMO is the best option for you. Once you have an SMO plan in place and have the resources to regularly manage profiles and respond to fans in a timely manner, you can start doing marketing activities.
If you’re a straightforward business type and don’t have the resources to manage profiles and have conversations with fans, SMO is the best option for you. The optimization first requires work. Once you’ve done it a couple of times it becomes a habit. However, if you really want to be consistent with your tasks and be effective, there are a few campaign guidelines you need to follow:
- Optimize your social media profiles with content keywords and an ALT tag for images in the image gallery. Some of the most popular platforms are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Blog.
- Draw up a plan / schedule for the social media activities that need to be done daily / weekly / monthly. This is the schedule that the resource responsible for running the social media plan should adhere to. If you are using in-house resources, you will need to train them to do the job effectively. You also have the option to outsource the effort.
- Syndicate content. The content can be in the form of text, video, or images. For example, if you write two blog posts per month and publish the blog posts, syndicate those posts on multiple platforms and bookmark websites. Tools / plugins are available to automate this process. If you have one video scheduled per month, optimize the video with SEO-optimized tags and descriptions on YouTube and syndicate the same video to multiple video parking lots. Content Syndication generates lots of high quality links and contributes to SMO.
- Make sure you measure the results of all activities
