Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are two important that we often hear these days and consider both to be the same. These two terms are the most inevitable parts of an Online Marketing Campaign, but a lot of people consider both to be the same. The fact is that both SMO and SMM are different from each other, even though both use the same platform, i.e Social Media.
Social Media Optimization is generally the optimization of a websites and its pages to make it more friendly for Social Media, where as Social Media marketing includes the major process such as traffic generation, lead generation, revenue generation etc from social media sites. Websites use different social media channels depending upon the nature of its products and services.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) includes activities such as making the website more social media friendly so that visitors find it more easy to share the site or page through social media channels. Consider that you have a unique and interesting product info page on your website. A user coming to that page finds it interesting and wishes to bookmark it. He will first look anywhere on the page to find out whether there is any online bookmarking button. If not, he would have to satisfy with the browser bookmark option. But once he changes his system he would not be able to see the bookmark, and on the other hand if he had bookmarked if online he would have been able to get that bookmark from anywhere on the internet.
So here is when social media optimization comes into play, which helps the visitor for online bookmarking of that page. For that the page needs to have attractive social media buttons which helps to bookmark and share the page online. This would be handy in getting quality backlinks from the bookmark site and also it would help in getting the page across other users.
RSS feeds and subscription options are another way to optimize your website or web page. Those interesting in your site or product updates can subscribe easily via the RSS feeds.
Another way to optimize a site for social media is to run a blog on the website which has interesting and unique postings so that it can be bookmarked and share through the social media sites. Since blogs contain fresh contents, it is always helpful for its SEO activities. The blog content can also be used for social media campaigns which brings an uplift to the overall performance of the site.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is somewhat different from Social Media Optimization (SMO) and mainly deals with traffic and lead generation with the help of social media sites. Social Media Marketing is actually the continuation of Social Media Optimization. Once the pages are optimized for social media, they are thrown into the social media world to bring more traffic and leads.
Different sites use different social media channels depending upon the nature of the websites and its products. Different sites are suited for different social media audience and hence it has to be marketed accordingly. It can be either promoted through social news sites, social bookmarking sites, social networking sites, social video sites etc. Some examples are Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter, Youtube etc. One has to find the relevant social media audience and promote the site or its pages to get relevant traffic from it.
Hope that you have got an idea about the differences between Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). I have already posted about some of the major social media sites earlier in this blog.
Pravin says
Hi all,
This a nice information of SMO & SMM, But you saw a both are same say some people but you are relies the get a both are different optimization technique..
Rajiv Walia says
Good job George…
George says
Thanks Rajiv..