Why Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are different?

Why Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are two different entities in the context of digital marketing? 

What is Social media optimization (SMO)?

It is a process of making your website social media marketing ready; on the other hand Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a process to market your business on social networks. And we approximately mistaken as both were same! 

Meaning of SMO:

Social media optimization, is an extensive process, where you need to work on your website and web pages, so that they can perform in an optimum way on social media. As working as freelance, we follow an extensive process for social media optimization. Here are some of the most important techniques of SMO, we follow:

Adding social widgets: It’s always advisable to add social widgets and badges to your webpages. It enables your viewers to share your content easily on the preferred social networks. Your audience can pick and choose any network that they want for sharing your content.  

Installing social sharing buttons: Sometimes, people cannot share your content on social media, even if they want to. The reason is, they cannot find the social sharing buttons easily or not at all. Make sure you place the buttons at the most optimum place, so your users find them easily with each piece of content. 

Initiating social sign-ins:  Another way to increase social footprints is, getting social sign-in while logging in. This is to ensure more social connections, as they tend to engage with business more than non-connected users. It would also offer easy sign-up process for your business. 

Starting social interaction: The more you interact on social media, the more stories you create. This would inevitably increase your social footprints. Moreover, your users will get more stories to act upon on social networks. Search engines consider social stories as votes. So, it would also help you in SEO. 

Creating shareable content: To ensure your social media optimization process works for a long time, you need to create great content consistently on social media. Regularly upload fresh content on your website and social media profiles. And don’t forget to optimize them for search. 

Sharing content regularly: Once the content is ready, make sure to share them on multiple channels. The more you do it, the more social footprints you get. You also can try different formats of a same content to ensure maximum reach from different sources. However, always choose the networks that can add value to your business. 

Optimizing the social pages: Last but not the least, you need to optimize your social media profiles with proper information about your business. It includes your business URL, about the business, address, logo etc. Each social network has its own search process. Optimizing your social profiles would help you increase visibility. 

What is Social media marketing (SMM)?

It is a long-term process, where we concentrate on posting updates, social media campaigns, social media customer services, and branding activities. Even though, many of us might consider SMO as a part of SMM, but the fact remains, SMM starts when SMO ends. 

Meaning of SMM:

In context to SMO, SMM is very vast in its scope. In other words, we can say SMM initiates with SMO and it has many more sub entities which I have tried to explain below. Some of them are;

Do you like to work with a proper strategy to obtain some tangible results? 

Yes, SMM do follow some strategical research to propagate a result- based procedure. In simple meaning, Social media strategy is the basic step of social media marketing, where we decide the goal, associated metrics, the best social networks for a project, best time to post on them, the best content format to connect well with the audience. It’s a long documentation that we follow throughout the project duration. 

Competitive analysis: Social media competitive analysis also plays a crucial role in social media marketing. We thoroughly monitor your competitors and their community to suss out the best plan for you. There are social media tools like Facebook Fanpage Karma, Twitonomy, Similar Web, BuzzSumo that help us in the process. Anyone can expect better engagement, impression, reach through SMM when competitive analysis is a part of social media marketing.

It is a matter of fact how to follow social media style guide? 
It needs a good expertise to analyse which social media style guide will give you best result. But still, social media style guide is an essential part of branding and every business, be it small or large, must have a style guide for their social media marketing. Wondering how do we do it? Simple. We analyze the target audience, their age, preferences, online behavior and based on all these data we create a unique tone and voice that goes well with the existing website theme. 

Social media content calendar: Social media marketing is largely based on the content. So, we plan and create a detailed content calendar including all the important and relevant days for the client. We also make sure to send them to the client, so ha/she knows what we’re planning for them. 

Engaging with the audience: Engagement plays a big role in social media marketing. We do it with our organic posts, social media ads, and social media campaigns. And that’s not all. We closely monitor all the conversations happening in and around our social media community to address the issues more quickly. Social media listening tools would help you in this. 

Monitoring the right metrics: Planning and execution will only take you through half way. Monitoring the metrics to see if your strategy is at all working, constitutes a major portion of social media marketing. Tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Fanpage etc will make your job easier. 

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