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Leverage SMO to Gain More Visibility

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PCQ Bureau
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Social media is a fantastic new buzzword all over the world, with the fall of various dictators across the middle east and rallying of masses for 'India against corruption' being amongst the more newsworthy stories that we may have come across in the recent past, not to forget Facebook's impending listing on the stock markets.

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Social media has evolved over the years, and is no more confined to just having a Facebook account or a Twitter feed. Social Media Optimization can be leveraged to generate awareness about your brand or a product, by posting and sharing content across social networks. Having said that, there are several ways and means of doing that. You can create buzz using RSS feeds, sharing buttons and incorporating third party functions such as images and videos. Plus, having people visit your website via Facebook/Twitter, carrying out promotional activities in social media such as sharing, commenting and posting updates can bring you sales pitch to start building rapport with your prospective clients.

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Social media optimization is a type of search engine marketing, where the focus is primarily on driving traffic from sources other than search engines. However, improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO. SMO is also in a way connected to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way, the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.



Online reputation management through SMO

MO is considered an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence. It is not limited to marketing and brand building. Increasingly, smart businesses are integrating social media participation as part of their knowledge management strategy (i.e., product/service development, recruiting, employee engagement and turnover, brand building, customer satisfaction and relations, business development and more). Additionally, social media optimization can be implemented to foster a community of the associated site, allowing for a healthy business-to-consumer relationship

Essentially SMO comes down to figuring out a Return On Investment (ROI) to make it largely feasibly for SMEs and to make this a relevant aspect of their integrated PR and marketing strategy. While multi-national companies take to social media like bees to honey, it has taken the SME a while to catch on. But social media is an essential arena especially for SMEs to listen and communicate with their clients and potential clients, as well as to engage with them in relevant conversation that is likely to generate fantastic brand management results for the company. It is important to hire the best people to execute SMO policies in tandem with our SEO policy. If the budgets do not allow for a professional to be hired, you can train one of the in house candidates to take on social media initiatives for the company.

While ROI is essential, it is also important to keep a tab on what social media is really doing for you in real time. Thus, basic google analytics along with Facebook analytics can assist in monitoring your SEO and adverts, but it is good to use tools such as Peerindex and Klout to understand how much you are influencing people and also quantify it. PeerIndex helps social media contributors assess and score their influence and benefit from the social capital they have built up, while Klout provides social media analytics to measure a user's influence across their social network. The analysis is done on data taken from sites such as Twitter and Facebook and measures the size of a person's network, the content created, and how other people interact with that content.

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