5 Top Tips for Clients Thinking of SMO

Tweet this, tweet that, poke me, follow me, be my friend, be my fan, addthis, addthat, digg it, dug it, sphinn it, spun it.  What on earth have we stumbled upon!

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) has become even more important over the last 18 months and the announcement last week that Google will launch its social search means this landscape will change at an even faster pace over the next 12 months.

Should you care about SMO? The answer is yes you should care, providing your customers are out there.  If your customers don’t exist in online communities then there’s no requirement for you to. Having a presence would be like gardening at Terry Waite’s house in the 80’s, it could look beautiful but it’s unlikely to be seen (sorry Terry).

So here are my top tips for successful SMO:

Tip number 1 - make sure your social efforts are in the right place and make sure you’re fully aware of all relevant activity.  Setup brand & keyword monitoring tools, research your competitors and monitor their social activity.  You need to be as close to the action as possible. If your competitors are doing SMO, does it look like its working?  What do they do and how do they engage their audience?  You need to be really aware of your surroundings to stay one step ahead.

Tip number 2 - is to create a strategy that’s integrated with existing efforts, other valuable content and other communications.  The web is awash with stalagmites of SMO; twitter pages bolted-on to very little.  Facebook pages left to fallow or a blog which has stagnated so much, it could do with un-blogging.  Make sure there is genuine value in what you have to offer and use all the SMO touch points to engender a following.

Tip number 3 – make it accessible. If you create a useful app, make sure it’s easy to download, make sure you blog about it and perhaps it could feature in your news.  You could create a video tutorial on how to use it.  If you have useful data, make it interesting. Create a graph, create a pretty picture, you could even create a Venn diagram if that’s what floats your boat!  Whatever you create, make it easy for people to share your content across the web or embed it into their own site. Bookmark these pages, comment on other sites and invite people to comment on yours.

Tip number 4 - ensure you have a very clear understanding of what success looks like.  Without that, it’s a guessing game.  It’s equally as important, in my opinion, to measure the wider success of the SMO campaign but also to measure the direct effect of your efforts.  Campaign success may look like increased numbers of people in your group, increased numbers of followers in twitter or it may look like a monetary success; unique offers seeded solely through the social space can be easily tracked on-site.  It may simply look like increased numbers of page views, visits or time-on-site.  It should probably look like a number of the above!  So how do you measure the wider success?  New links to your site, positive mentions of the brand in relation to your SMO activity, improved SEO listings, traffic, conversions or any combination of the above.  

Tip number 5 – following the very recent announcement of Google’s social search, it’s just become even more important to make sure you have as many followers, fans, contacts & blog subscribers as possible as the virtual fence around your social circle will limit its reach.  Look at all the access points Google will consider for serving social search results and ensure they are as well optimised as possible.

For those faltering between should-I shouldn’t-I, be under no illusion, SMO will out-pace SEO in the coming years. Your content diversity needs to be compelling enough to stay the distance.