Online marketing is all about awareness and visibility. Most of the time, people find your small business online in one of three ways:

Your company is on top in search engine results,
You’re mentioned or recommended by another person or website they visit, or
They already know about your company and go looking for you

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy with the broad goal of bringing more people to your website the first way, by improving your search engine rankings. Social media optimization (SMO) can be one part of SEO—but it also contributes to all three ways people find you online.

We often hear about website and search engine optimization, but social media optimization is not so famous like SEO. Whether you’ve heard the term or not, you may already optimizing your social media posts every day.

Here are a few examples:

Checking your analytics to see what days and times your fans are most likely to read and interact with your posts.
Focusing on using post formats your audience prefers, such as images versus videos.
Ensuring your blog content is easily shareable by including social share buttons after every post.

One of the main goals of social media optimization (SMO) is to increase awareness of your business or products using social media, and it has many benefits. This means making your content as shareable as possible by focusing both on industry best practices as well as what’s worked for you in the past.

Some aspects of SMO will happen as an organic by-product of creating high-quality content: when people visit your site and love your content, they’ll be more likely to share it via Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites. As more people see and share your content, your site acquires buzz, inbound links, referral traffic, and strong social signals, all of which help your organic search visibility.

So, what factors are important for SMO? What strategies can you use to increase both the visibility and reach of your social media posts? How can you structure your posts to give them the best chance of clicks and conversions? Following are five tips to get you on the right track.

Social media optimization (SMO) was originally designed to drive traffic from social media sites such as bookmarking sites and social networks. However, SMO is now significantly more important and not simply because social networking has grown but because SMO also improves SEO performance. Good SMO will drive traffic from both direct social site referrals and from search engine.

7 Steps To improve SMO

Reputation – build your reputation as a reliable qualified source
Engagement – encourage more engagement, sharing & reciprocate
Authority – become a notable authority in your field of expertise
Leadership – harness originality & creativity, be a Thought Leader
Social – be social, find and engage sociable experts in your field
Media – know your social media platforms to maximize influence
Optimization – improve technical aspects to increase optimization

In other words, SMO can lead to increased traffic to your site, as friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you’re likely reaching a well-targeted audience. Further, it also leads to improved search engine optimization, as major search engines count links as if they were votes for your site.

SMO isn’t just about building a bigger social media presence for your brand. Whether or not your organization has a strong social network presence, the social networks of others can be leveraged to great effect.

Your Social Media Marketing plan must combine intelligence, best practice and creative strategy to help your brand engage and expand its community, so you reach the target audience.

SEO and Social Media has certainly grown together, in which both practices are able to benefit businesses worldwide to be more visible to their target audience by simply applying these two marketing strategies into a single powerful approach.

Simply you must use successfuly SEO and SMO to grow your business and your profits.