In last 8-10 years, Internet world has encountered a boom in online social media marketing. Rapid growth of interest of people in social media communities (Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Pinterest etc.) has foster the companies to focus on Social Media Optimization (SMO) and to understand the importance of SMO. Even right now while you’re reading this millions of people are using Facebook and similar social sites. SMO basically refers to the optimization of a website in accordance with the social communities. A direct relationship between consumer and company can be established by SMO. This process creates huge publicity and awareness regarding the product among the social media users, which ultimately increases the social media ranking of a company. Moreover the chances of leads also increase. The whole social media is flooded up with potential customers. A strategically strong SMO campaign is very cost effective technique which holds tendency to divert huge traffic (customers) towards a website.
- The ‘like/share’ factor: Every like or share that a post gets on Facebook or every re-tweet is considered as ‘vote’ by the user/consumer. Vote helps search engines to produce user recommended search results. High voting for a particular product signifies the public interest. High public interest brings the website traffic and ranking up. Thus in an indirect way SMO works as SEO also and diverts traffic from a social website to the trader’s website.
- The Viral Marketing: The viral marketing takes birth in the world of social media only. In every successful viral campaign it has been seen that the quality of post matters a lot. It should hit the interest and need of the consumer directly. For example, com’s ad on YouTube has more that 3 million views because of the hilarious and real content which focuses directly on the user interest. Whenever any picture, video or any other kind of post goes viral, it becomes more like a trend. Share, recommendations, repining, re-tweets fuel up the popularity index and generate huge traffic for company’s website.
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- Geographical Targeting: Search engines have introduced a new feature called personalized results, lately. This system produces location and interest based relevant results. Yelp, Google Places, Foursquare, and Yahoo! Local are some of the personalized search engines. It provides a great opportunity to trader to focus on consumers of a particular geographical location with particular interest. Almost all of the results on these personalized SE come from the recommendations on social media. Thus a successful SMO campaign can be great lead-generator and contributor to high conversion rates.
- Customer-Trader Relationship: Through pages and blogs, social media creates a bridge between traders and consumers. Apart from the social exposure, brand building and publicity; companies are using social media for product/service development, business development, customer satisfaction and relations, recruiting, etc. It has been noticed that offers and events that companies post on social media attract more users as compared to any Ad. Moreover, live feedback in form of ‘comments’ and ‘likes’ provide useful information for knowledge management department for further improvement of the product. This improves online reputation of the company and strengthens Customer-Trader relationship.
