Social Media Optimization Skills For Driving Traffic
Just creating profiles on any Social Media platform is not enough. You need a thorough strategy and maintenance to be effective. These social media platforms are valuable for earning and converting leads. This requires you to invest your time to create a solid social media presence. A great way to draw value from most of your social media profiles is using social media optimization or SMO. A strategic approach that helps you develop your profiles and interact with your followers.
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What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?
Social media optimization or SMO is a digital marketing strategy for increasing brand awareness.
It builds relationships with potential and current customers.
The platform helps to drive traffic to your website, encourages sales, conversions from leads. It finally leads to revenue growth.
SMO uses social media networks for growing an organization’s message and online presence. It harnesses social media networks to grow a business’s online presence. Thus helping businesses achieve their goals.
The question arises, how can you realize the most potential out of your SEO efforts? What advanced skills should you look out for in an individual to move ahead in the game?
Here are some of the advanced skills, which you must look out for if you are interested in boosting your efforts in SMO.
SMO is a digital marketing strategy for increasing awareness of brand services and products. It also mitigates potential damaging news and connects with customers.
The demand for SMO and social media marketing professionals is growing exponentially. If a brand presence is not there on social media today, it will likely fall behind and lose out to competitors. SMO also improves SEO performance. Good SMO practices will drive traffic from search engines and direct social site referrals.
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SMO Skills: Outstanding Communication Skills
You cannot assume things. There has to be a transparent exchange of information amongst the team members to be on a single page. Getting along with colleagues is a must have skill. You need to put your ideas and campaigns into words, and be the voice of your brand on a global stage!
You cannot compromise on outstanding communication skills. It can be the prime reason for failure or success. SMO professionals need to reach out to influencers and need to develop relationship building skills.
Although you‘re utilizing social media as a tool, you’re still marketing. This means that social media is just a tool, and you need a solid understanding of basic marketing principles.
Social media users have a tendency to unfollow a brand if the content shared is repetitive or boring. SMO professionals need to come up with engaging ideas to keep followers engaged. They need to create initiatives, interactive contents, contests, campaigns and viral videos. The social media optimizers must think out of the box to stand apart from the crowd.
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SMO Skills: Strategic Planning and Results
Behind every successful execution of an idea or campaign lies how well it has been strategically planned. Your brilliant idea and the written communication will become meaningless if there is no strategy.
SMO success depends on your strategic planning skills in creating publishing schedules and tracking contacts. In other words, how proactive is the maintenance of social media profiles.
Whatever be the campaign, or the strategy, you as a social media marketer must not deviate from your goals. Your goal is to ensure a strong presence on social media. Thus, all the time, you have to maintain the focus on creating excellent and engaging content. The content language may be great. But it must be interesting enough for the audience to keep returning for more.
SMO professionals have to be extraordinary multi-taskers. They must have good project management skills. One needs to track contacts, create publishing schedules, and maintain social media profiles. They need to generate reports, meet writers and designers, and manage advertising budgets.
If they have solid project management skills, the best SMO professional will stay on top of all tasks. They will be aware of what content needs planning and when it needs to be published. They also need to keep track of all the different social media conversations threads.
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SMO Skills: Learning Aptitude and Analytical Skills
All are aware that technology is rapidly changing. Regularly new features are getting added to existing platforms, be it Instagram reels or LinkedIn stories. Additionally, consumer expectations can change on a whim as well. An excellent SMO professional must willingly learn these on the fly as needed to stay ahead in the game.
You need to understand why a specific content or a product is being liked compared to the other. In addition, you also need to have the analytical skill to figure out why your audience likes or dislikes a particular product. Basically you should have an understanding of the continuous thought process.
Finally, you need to check whether your marketing is working. Here, your analytical skills come to play. You need to check metrics and reporting. Additionally, you need to have an analytical mind which will help you make sense of all the data. This will enable you to make informed and good decisions instead of assumptions.
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SMO Skills: Content Curation and Management
It is important to keep track of which content is being shared where. You must have an in-depth knowledge of your audience’s content preferences. An infographic is always preferred compared to text content.
It is rare to find an audience who will invest their time for more than 10 minutes to read textual content. In such a scenario, when an infographic can convey the same information in a minute.
No doubt videos and images dominate much of social media writing and also have a critical role to play. So, whether you’re creating a post or crafting a tweet, remember crisp writing. Crisp writing skills are a hallmark of a social media marketer’s job profile. If headlines aren’t magnetic or captivating enough, your content will not even get a click.
There is only one original content which is itself challenging if you are not creative. Many tools in the market can catch copied content, so don’t even think of copy-pasting content. You can best curate original content, but that again is an art, and you need experts to do it.
The last thing is to lose reputation and business due to plagiarized content. Content curation has always been an integrated social media optimization skill. This statement holds true, especially for those businesses that do not have the time to create a steady flow of content independently.
Why is Social Media Optimization Important?
The top five reasons which make SMO necessary are as follows.
Reason 1: SMO ensures a strong presence on the web
Ensure a significant web presence for your business with SMO and establish the internet visibility of the brand. It helps in branding and introduces people to the company. It improves brand visibility and recall.
Reason 2. SMO increases the reach
SMO allows reaching out to niche audiences. It will enable you to position the brand to the customers on their terms. Your customers get a chance to reach out to you anywhere and anytime.
Reason 3. SMO drives more Traffic
SMO is an excellent technique for traffic generation. It allows you to reach your customers globally through social media networks. The brand gets global visibility without extra investments.
Reason 4.Lead Generation with SMO
No doubt, social media is a powerful tool for branding and creating buzz. It is used for lead generation. The lead generation campaigns undergo a significant transformation when you tap into social media networks.
Reason 5. SMO improves Search Engine Ranking
The synchronized SEO and SMO efforts help in improving the ranking on the search engines. Search engines have started data acquisition from social media channels such as Google+ and showing them on the search results. Due to this, SMO has gained prominence among marketers.
Final Thoughts
Advanced SMO skills should not lose focus from their original goal of enhancing the social media profiles. It would help if you tweaked these profiles to increase the awareness of the brand you are promoting. It must reach out to diverse audiences and integrate them with the business. Finally, it would be best to drive more organic traffic by introducing the brand to the consumers.