Many people consider Social Media Optimisation (SMO) to be the new Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). To an extent, this is true. In the past, if you overlooked the importance of optimising your website for search engines, you would have learned the importance of SEO the hard way. Invariably, you would have lost a large number of clients to the competition. More importantly, you would have lost an even larger number of visitors to your website as well. After all, if the search engine doesn’t know that your brand exists, how can you expect the average internet user to know about your business? The importance of appearing in the first page of search results has made many business owners fine tune their SEO strategies with each update in the search engine algorithm.

Over time, the internet led to the emergence of social media networks. These networks enabled people to stay connected online. Given how busy most people are, it isn’t easy for many people to take time to visit or call their friends and relatives on a daily or weekly basis. Social media networks enable these individuals to remain connected online. Smartphones have brought the internet into the palms of the hands of many users. As a result, even on the busiest of days, people will update their Facebook profiles, LinkedIn details, send tweets etc.

To build a successful SMO strategy for your brand:

• Determine and define your objectives (such as increased volumes of sales, improved reputation etc.), while setting your goals
• Ascertain your target audience and determine the best means by which you could engage with them
• Ensure that you create content that people will be more likely to share with their friends
• Include lists of relevant tags and suggested notes for a link
• Use short links for making your content easy to view and access
• Ensure that you use permalinks in your blogs as permalinks automatically capture keywords specified in the URL titles, which search engines look for as they navigate your site – these can make it easier for readers to copy and share
• Improve the visibility of your brand by sharing the content of people who are sharing your content
• Enhance your relevance in search engine results by adding outbound links to areas that could be of use to others and,
• Keep monitoring and evolving your online-marketing strategies by using new tools and products to engage with your customers