With digital marketing shifting its focus toward users instead of search engines, social media optimization (SMO) has been on the rise. Lengthy, keyword-rich copy is still a great way to get seen by search engines, but for connecting with customers, SMO is the new frontier.
We were recently named one of the Best SMO Companies of 2016. And maybe it’s just that Thanksgiving is within our sight, but we’re feeling extra grateful for receiving this award. So we’d like to share some of our top SMO strategies with you!
Whether you’re looking to enhance your campaigns or those of your client’s, here’s what it takes to have an award-winning SMO strategy.
Our Award-Winning SMO Methodology
Social media is excellent at distilling BIG ideas into tiny text. We recently talked a lot about the importance of headlines in getting people to click, and these same tips apply to social media optimization. On social sites like Facebook and Twitter, users won’t pay attention to more than a handful of words. You’ve got to make every word count to grab their attention.
Our proven SMO methodology involves crafting social posts to attract the client’s target audience. A specific set of principles guides our team to success, and we’ve listed them here for your convenience:
Be consistent in schedule and tone. Once you start gaining a good number of followers who you regularly engage with, they’ll expect to hear from you on that same regular basis. You have to learn when your audience is the most active, and then be sure to post every day at that time. Whether that’s once a week or every day, including weekends, you need to be consistent. Schedule your posts if you must, but make sure you don’t deviate from your schedule. With time, you’ll find that keeping consistent will be easy—and your success will show with increased engagement.
Play to the company’s strengths. Not every company should use social media in the same way. Some companies are naturally more visually friendly than others, which means they can use sites like Instagram and Pinterest better than others can. Although Twitter has a notorious expectation for witty banter between brand and followers, that style of user engagement may not match up with your company. It can take some effort to identify what customers expect from your social channel, but once you do you’ll strengthen your brand, leading to a considerable advantage over your competitors.
Have an end goal. What is the purpose of your social endeavors? Why are you expending any effort on social media at all? It’s easy to assume that you need to be on social, but without proper direction, you’ll just be wasting time. You need a clear, definable goal for every online action. Whether that’s to attract users to your landing page or get them to share your post, you need to keep that goal in mind with every post, every status update, and every Tweet you make. However, if users aren’t behaving the way you want them to (not clicking, not sharing, etc.), then it’s time to take a step back, figure out what you’re doing wrong, and fix it. From there, you’ll be able to justify each of your efforts and know that it’s making a real difference.
Become the Best SMO Company
It’s time—you have all the tools and strategies you need to become the best SMO company. With enough experience, you’ll be able to hone them to a level of near-perfect execution.
A big thank you to PromotionWorld and FindBestSEO for choosing us as one of the best SMO companies this month. With one month to go until the end of 2016, we’ll see what kind of successes December has in store for us. In the spirit of the holidays, we have a good feeling we’ll be in a sharing mood again.
Be sure to check our blog to find out what’s next!
