Is SMO the new SEO?
The term SMO was coined by Rohit Bhargava. Lets begin this writing with defining SMO. It’s a comparatively new term and SMO stands for Social Media Optimization yes the entire buzz around social media and networking. SMO is a form of online marketing that focuses on how to use social media websites to drive traffic, create buzz, build brand recognition and add quality links back to a website. This phenomenon is ready to invade the Search Engine Optimization. Soon we’ll find Social media optimization and marketing experts providing consulting services and writing books.
Social media websites have different categories and depending on the type of business one can decide where to promote the business. Social media websites include social news websites, video sharing websites and social networking websites. The changing face of online marketing is making SMO the new SEO as SMO can be as powerful and effective in building large number of links back to a website thus improving the website popularity and ultimately organic search ranking.
One of the myths about social media is it’s demographics. Most of us believe that teenagers are the ones spending time on social networking. The truth is social network with million of members has millions of adults too. Adults do like to stay connected and interact with their old friends and make new friends via social media. Adult members do share pictures, video etc with their loved ones.
Businesses are aggressively integrating social media in their marketing plan. Social media do helps in achieving marketing objectives like building brand recognition, positive brand & corporate image, promote new products, customer feedback, etc.
Some of the interesting website are mybloglog, myspace, youtube, linkedin, twitter, etc. MyBlogLog is a great way to get way to get people visit your website and learn more about your business. Twitter is a free social networking service, members can send short messages upto 140 characters to twitter friends. LinkedIn is extremely popular amongst business professionals. The website lets business professional network and interact with like minded people. YouTube and Revver are social networking websites focused on sharing videos.
Online is an open world and SMO is all about honesty, if you are not able to establish credibility you cannot go anywhere. We are sharing information both business and personal so good faith is the key to the success in the world of Social media. Share relevant information, post the information at appropriate websites, build quality links, quality is more important than quantity , stay on top, do it religiously to be on the front page of social news sites.
Please send your feedback and comments
Kriti Jaising
EkoBuzz
Social media is already a rage across demographics and geography, and it is hard to argue against any prediction of how marketers will increasingly exploit this medium.
A couple of preliminary thoughts come to mind related to SMO.
1. At a cursory level, SMO seems conceptually similar to the low-yield efforts of parents trying to secure the attention of their 4-year old deliriously lost with other kids in the dreamy world of their favorite candy store. Question is whether such a candy store is an optimal place to get a parental message across or if such a message is more effectively served in the captive atmosphere of one’s home, where the parent could secure the child’s undivided attention. So, a major challenge for marketers would be to ensure that their efforts in social media sites yield meaningful returns.
2. While an easy and effective medium for creating buzz, the egalitarian and hyper-interactive aspect of social media websites gives rise to the inevitable possibility of businesses having to deal with publicly revelations and defending themselves against customer flames/complaints and indiscriminate comparisons with their competitors. Marketers therefore may have to prepare for this new challenge by adopting guerrilla-warfare style messaging , dynamically revising their competitive stories and being more engaged with the customer community than ever before. This will surely test the best of marketers
3. While the above are considered points of caution, I agree with the hopeful sentiment that social media is a land of promise for marketers. People are going to increasingly exchange and seek opinions on these sites (as is evidenced in the popularity of product feedback/discussion sections of any ecommerce sites such as Amazon and the likes) and will be marketed one way or the other – through the noise coming from their peers or the concerted messaging coming from marketers. While the former have invaded social media, the marketers have to conquer some of the social media wilderness for themselves.
Many of us I am sure are waiting with bated breath for that to happen, which will usher in a new era of turbo-charged business-customer communication.
Enjoyed reading your post and looking forward to reading more.