SMO and SMM: Major Tips to Keep in Mind

Social networking platforms have become an inseparable part of life these days. Businesses and people that want to take advantage of social media platforms need to know the best practices and top tips. Learn those major tips in this blog post.

We, Digital Marketers India, are one of the leading social media agencies and we have benefited many businesses and individuals with our proficiency in taking the right advantage of social media for business branding, personal branding, and lead generation. 

Difference between SMO and SMM

SMO and SMM are two different activities and you need to know about them before jumping with the tips related to SMO and SMM.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) means optimizing social media profiles or pages. 

Social Media Marketing means regular marketing on social media profiles or pages.

I know it was simple, but it was needed to be explained for aspiring social media managers.

Major Tips for effective SMO and SMM:

Tip #1: Select the right social media platform for marketing

The most common method of performing SMM by naive social media managers or by anyone new is opening social media pages on all sites and start posting on it. This is not the right approach for effective social media marketing. 

Keep the following tips in mind to choose the right social media platform:

• Match your buyer persona with the users of that social networking site. For example, if you are targeting Millenials, Facebook marketing can be more effective than Snapchat or Instagram marketing.
• Match your business type with the users of that platform. For example, if your business nature is B2B, then LinkedIn is a better platform for social media marketing than Facebook.

These are two important criteria to think upon before selecting a platform. Even if you want to have a brand presence on all social media platforms, this information will help you in driving social media marketing and paid ad campaigns on the right social media platforms.

Tip #2: Start with social media optimization

Many people say, there is nothing difficult in creating a page. That is right. 

However, creating a page or profile is not enough. You have to optimize the profile and page with the best practices. Some of the major tips for effective social media optimization (SMO) are listed below:

• Choose the right name which depicts your brand
• Select the handle that matches your brand name. Social handle means your page or profile name shown at the top in the URL
• If possible, try to have the same social handle on all social media profiles and pages of the same brand.
• Completely fill the profile, including, but not limited to:
  • Name
  • Short description
  • Long description
  • Hashtags
  • Product lists
  • Contact details
  • Website URL
• Add a high-quality profile picture and a cover page as per the given size of a specific social media

Tip #3: Make a Social Media Marketing Calander

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is not a random job to do. You are trying to build a brand and attract audiences to be your loyal fans and followers. Thus, you cannot simply wake up in the morning and post what is the next thing you think about.

Social media marketing is a very strategic job. You need to be thoughtful about the content you post on the page or profile. You also need to be regular with the posting schedule. Thus, you have to make a weekly, biweekly, or monthly calendar. This social calendar holds the following:

• Date
• Punchline for the post
• Graphics for the post, if there will be any
• Video for the post, if there will be any
• hashtags

Tip #4: Be Regular

One of the major aims of social media marketing is to build loyal fans and followers. For that, you have to post regularly. Some of the tips to keep in mind are as below:

• Post every day if you can. You must post a minimum 5 times a week..
• Choose the time of the day and post by following that time. You can also use social media tools for scheduling the posts to go at the right time every day. This time should not be selected randomly. Choose the posting schedule according to the peak time of your audience. It means when your audience will more likely to get online and scroll the feed.
• Be regular with content type as well. For example, if you post a new blog post link on each Wednesday, you must follow that routine. This helps in increasing loyalty of followers as they know at this time on this day of the week, they will get the content they want.

Tip #5: Post high quality and relevant content

If you are running an SEO agency and offering website SEO services, your social media pages and profiles must be related to the topic of SEO and maximum revolve around digital marketing. You should not be sharing something irrelevant such as travel vlogs. Be relevant to the services and offerings you have to build a genuine follower base that can be converted to buyers in the future.

Tip #6: Be quick in responding

Social media platforms are primarily built for social networking and definitely not for selling. Yes, now, almost all social media platforms support business promotions and self-branding as well. However, a social media manager should not forget the fact of social networking. 

Here are some tips to keep in mind to be effective with social media marketing:

• Always be proactive in responding to comments. Even if it reads, ¨Nice¨. You must reply ¨Thanks¨. That is what it calls engagement on the business pages or personal profiles.
• Always respond to the direct messages and be the last one to close the conversation or mark as closed using the available tool in the direct messaging window. Your speed of response is even shown on your Facebook page, which can be an indicator of your responsiveness and definitely can affect your lead generation.
• Always be polite and professional with responses. Hate speech and derogatory comments are part of social media. If you ever face that you have to keep patience and be mindful of your responses. 

Tip #7: DO NOT SPAM

Social media spam involves many activities. Let me share some of them to give you a hint of social media spamming that you must avoid:

• Hashtag Spam: You must have come across a social media post with too many hashtags. Even some irrelevant hashtags. This is called hashtag spamming. Thus, use sufficient yet logical hashtags. You can also check the permissible hashtags on a specific social networking site and use them accordingly.
• Baiting: In social media, engagement baiting is common, which is a kind of spam. For example, write something or double-tap to see the magic is a kind of spam, called, engagement baiting. Read more here: 
• Message Spamming: Sending the same message to multiple people back to back is called message spamming. 
• Using trend marketing stupidly: Trend marketing is very useful, but you cannot do social media marketing in any trend. For example, if a celebrity dies and people are trending that celebrity and you put a condolence message with your website´s link or selling pitch is sheer spam and stupidity.

Tip #8: Use Paid Ads

Social media ads are essential these days because of the changing dynamics of social media platforms. For example, Facebook does not show the business page feed on any personal profile´s news feed. Let me explain with an example, if you have a business page and your friends have liked it. Your friends will not see what you post on your page until and unless they put that page in the favorite list or they visit the page themselves. Thus, you need Facebook marketing with paid ads to increase reach and results.

These are the top tips you must keep in mind while trying social media marketing on your own. The better approach is to hire a social media agency like ours, Digital Marketers India, that knows effective social media marketing and just relax. Let the experts do this job.