Social media is as powerful as ever. With the inclusion of search engine optimisation (SEO) and other digital marketing practices, social media has become more effective for promoting businesses. Brands that are expanding their business engage agencies that provide social media management in Singapore to strengthen their presence on target social media platforms. According to GWI’s data, the average user will visit 7.2 social media platforms each month. 90% of Instagram users follow a business, while Facebook users visit the local business page at least once a week.
The average user will visit 7.2 social media platforms each month.
90% of instagram users follow a business.
Facebook users visit the local business page at least once a week.
Source: GWI
Part of social media marketing in Singapore is managing your online presence to attract customers. In doing so, your business has better chances of growing, allowing you to raise brand awareness and promote your products and services.
What Is Social Media Optimisation?
Social media optimisation (SMO) is the process of using one or more social media networks to manage your online presence. It is also the purposeful creation and careful assessment of produced content for social media platforms. The goal is to optimise your social media page and content to boost your online presence and web visibility.
Why does it matter a lot?
The main key importance of SMO is how you can use social media posts to increase following, engagement and for better conversion with your targeted customers. SMO enables you to achieve specific marketing objectives and addresses a positive brand image. It is cost-effective and lets you access valuable insights into customer preferences, demographics and behaviour. Hence, SMO in digital marketing is also highly integral for amplifying digital presence.
How do you use social media optimisation?
To use social media optimisation well lies in identifying your goals, establishing a social media account, performing keyword research and incorporating them into your profile and posts. It is also concerned with conforming to the best practices, such as segmenting and using data to craft engaging content or story.
What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of SMO?
Even if the advantages weigh more than the disadvantages of social media optimisation, it is crucial to know some of the cons to determine how we can find solutions to the most common issues when one decides to conduct SMO or avail of SMO services.
What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of SMO?
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|
| 1. Strengthens online presence | 1. Possible risk of identity theft |
| 2. Enhances search engine ranking | 2. Risk of brand backlash from netizens |
| 3. Opportunity to access a global audience | 3. Time-consuming |
| 4. Gain better audience insights | |
| 5. A cost-effective approach for brand advertisement | |
| 6. Increase Website Traffic |
You can address the advantages by having a proper outline for your strategies, being cautious of the content you post and hiring a professional SMO agency to get things done.
How does SMO differ from SMM?
SMO may seem similar to social media marketing (SMM), but they are different in many ways. For instance, SMO details the process of optimising your content for social media, while SMM focuses on managing a campaign to engage with customers and compete against other businesses.
Also, SMO is closely related to SEO. The goal of SEO is to attract potential customers to your website. Doing so requires you to optimise your website and make it optimal for search engines like Google and Bing. With SMO, you can reach the same goal by creating and optimising your content on social media to drive traffic to your website. Hence among the reasons for the surging popularity of social media optimisation in Singapore.
How Does SMO Work? Knowing How SMO Work for Long-Term Growth
To better understand effective social media marketing in Singapore, we must recognise SMO as a set of strategies and techniques we can use across different social media platforms.
If we delve deeper into these strategies and techniques, we can find the following aspects:
1. Content Strategy
Tailoring engaging and inviting content to the target audience can help increase conversion and provide better traffic. Know the most relevant keywords and hashtags you can use, posting frequency and the duration or length of content to maximise benefits. You can learn more here.
ALSO READ: Mark The Dates: Social Media Calendar 2023
2. Collaboration
Most SMO marketing experts suggest the importance of collaborating or partnerships with well-known influencers and industry experts to expand your credibility and reach a newer audience. Here are the following examples of collaboration:
@narscosmetics A bronzed goddess @katiejanehughes ♬ Lo-fi hip hop – NAO-K
View this post on Instagram
3. Monitoring of Data & Analytics
Analytics and having valuable data can help you devise better strategies and approaches. It allows you to determine prevalent patterns, and identify opportunities and trends to reconfigure your marketing campaign across different social media platforms.
Analytics and having valuable data can help you devise better strategies and approaches. It allows you to determine prevalent patterns and identify opportunities and trends to reconfigure your marketing campaign across social media platforms.
Past data can serve as an anchor point for optimising future content by understanding how users interact with your content and determining their behaviour across different social media platforms.
Here are a few examples of how we can utilise these past data for optimising future content for each social media platform:
Facebook has Meta Business Suite that lets you access insight tools for optimising marketing and advertising results, including on Instagram.
Additionally, you can analyse organic and boosted posts performance to enhance your strategy, including budget allocation.
As we mentioned, Meta Business Suite lets you also access insights and manage posts on Instagram based on demographics and interests.
You can also monitor the performance of Reels to adjust your next effort plan for better audience engagement. You can also determine other types of visual content you have previously posted and see which one receives higher engagement to create similar future content.
TikTok
You can measure your past video performance and see which receives more comments, likes and shares. Determine what style, themes and elements stood out the most. Also, consider tracking sounds that were featured in successful TikTok videos.
Conducting an analysis of your competitor’s performance can also help you give ideas and strategies to employ for future content on the platform.
4. Post Boosting
Post-boosting is a social media advertising tactic that lets you promote your posts to a wider audience. It increases your engagement and reach on the platform by allowing you to target specific demographics and interests to drive traffic to the site. It is ideal boosting your posts upon uploading to maximise their impact, especially if your business lacks a strong community of followers.
Facebook’s Boost Posts is one known example of allowing you to create an ad campaign directly from your page without using Facebook’s ads platform. Boosted posts appear in the user’s news feed, and you can access controls from asset customisation, placements and detailed targeting.
5. Monitoring Social Media Performance
Knowledge is power. Know how you should respond to your followers online. Actively monitor your social media performance to discover the interests of your target audience.
There is a wide range of tools that will help you monitor your social media page. Use any effective tool to evaluate your social media performance. You can also observe your followers’ comments on any of your social media posts. Doing so allows you to improve the quality of your content based on your followers’ feedback.
6. Using Relevant Keywords
Same with SEO, keywords are essential for SMO. You can use them to make your posts more relevant on various social media sites.
For example, most social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, allow users to use keywords in the form of hashtags. Use hashtags to make your social media posts searchable for people finding relevant content and information.
Include the ideal hashtags in your social media posts by discovering the most relevant and suitable keywords for your content. Conduct keyword research and identify specific terms and phrases that will let you get closer to your target audience on social media.
Also, avoid overstuffing your social media posts with too many hashtags. It will make your social media page look spammy, so use only a reasonable number of hashtags.
7. Making A Clean, Recognisable Profile
Your social media profile is the foundation of your social media marketing campaign. It is the very first thing people will see when they visit your social media page. In that case, you need to optimise your profile and make a brilliant impression for first-time visitors and customers.
There are three main factors to consider when optimising your social media profile:
- Profile picture
- Bio
- Username
Your profile picture must be immediately visible and recognisable. Start by using a company logo or symbol that people can quickly distinguish from other brands.
As for your bio, you need to write a short description of your business. Make it catchy so people can immediately know more about your business in just a few words. You can also use keywords to make your description a little more relevant on search engines. Insert a link to your website so your followers can visit it anytime.
Lastly, your username should be short, concise, and consistent with all of your other social media marketing handles or usernames. Stick with a username that everyone will remember and know when they see it on social media.
Account Optimisation – What You Need to Know
Knowing how SMO works is not enough. Understanding account optimisation for your SMO marketing efforts targets should be high on your priority list as it benefits users and search engines. Here are a few key pointers to know for better account optimisation:
1. Follow your Brand Guidelines
Ensures each profile remains consistent across multiple social media platforms for consistent branding. It includes using the same high-quality logo, images, and colour scheme for designs and tones. It will help reinforce a better identity for audiences to recognise no matter what social media platforms they are on.
Profile Checking
Your social media profiles (along with all its info) must be up-to-date, consistent and cohesive, with images in high-quality condition. Also, consider making changes to settings and privacy and consider the features for each platform when necessary.
2. Reviews
Reviews left by customers who have purchased products or availed services serve as critical for leveraging your online presence, specifically on social media platforms. It can influence buyers’ decisions to engage with your brand.
When a customer leaves a positive review on your account page, it creates social proof that increases trust in your brand. However, poor reviews can dissuade them.
3. Include A Link to Your Website
When you are setting up a social media account, it is advisable to include a link to your website in your profile bio and posts to help drive more traffic to your site.
4. Always Complete Your Profiles
As much as possible, never leave everything unfilled out of your social media profiles. Provide information accurately as you can to make your target audience find and connect with your brand. One of the most crucial components of your profile that needs attention includes the following:
Profile picture
A profile picture is among the first things your customer would see when they visit your page. You may want to make it high-quality since it represents your brand.
Main business service or product offering
Including your main business service or product offering in your social media profile helps customers understand what your business does and what it has to offer.
Contact information
Ensure that your customers can access and see your contact info. Include your email address and phone number in your profile.
Profile bio or description
It should provide a brief overview of your brand, how it started and what it does or provides to its customers. Make it clear and concise and highlight the value proposition or uniqueness. Think of it as a way of introducing the brand to the audience.
Address
Your address carries the specific street address of your business, especially if you have a physical storefront or provide services in a specific geographical setting. It is vital information to help customers navigate to your business location.
Conversion Optimisation
Conversion optimisation is applied to SMO as it is fundamental to your marketing objectives to increase the number of users who will make a purchase or click through your website. Here are a few tips to increase your SMO marketing conversion rate:
1. Use Clear & Effective CTAs
CTA or call-to-action are short yet powerful to compel your readers to take a certain action. CTAs are often relevant to whatever content you wish to publish. CTAs are often placed at the last part of a produced content. Here are examples:
– Sign-up today and get a free discount code!
– Contact us now for a free quote!
Always write them as short, direct and clear as possible.
2. Use Engaging Assets
Images and videos are excellent mediums that can elevate social media optimisation when you do them right. According to Instagram’s survey, 91% of active users watch videos on the platform weekly. On the other hand, LinkedIn posts with images receive a 98% higher comment rate on average.
These are assets or the file/material components we upload (images, videos, links, audio, texts, etc.) for posting. Creative assets are the same components except that it is more carefully designed to add more visual or creative appeal to capture more attention and can distinguish visual elements from other parts of the post. Examples of this are images turned into memes or carousel illustrations.
Understanding Creative Assets
Most assets are pre-existing (stock photo or a captured video, for example) and tend to support an overall context or post’s message. Meanwhile, creative assets are more customised multimedia elements. It can stand out on its own to convey a message, such as a well-designed infographic poster.
Think of creative assets as a race car for a specific race event, while assets are your typical cars. They serve the same purpose, except that the other one (creative asset) is more optimal for creating visual engagement effectively.
Different Asset Types To Know
Images
Images are among the most vital assets. It can serve to showcase what your product or service looks like, convey a specific message or provide a visual aid to text-based content. Additionally, we can further break it down into various asset types, such as:
- Infographic – a visual representation of data
- Carousel image – images in a slideshow format within a single post
- Animated images – add motion to your image, such as GIF file formats
Videos
Videos can be short and simple, but some can be long and complex, depending on your objectives. They are a powerful multimedia element for creating more engagement with your audience and tailoring compelling content among crowded social media feeds. Many social media marketing firms and experts recommend using video assets if you want to drive more conversions. Here are different video asset types:
- Reels – often short, vertical videos that are typically a 60 seconds long or less to be informative, engaging and entertaining
- Product reveals – helps build anticipation and create excitement around soon-to-launch products
- Tutorials – tutorial videos are highly favoured since they provide value to audience and helps establish the authority of your brand
User-Generated Content
Creating content can be time-consuming. If you already have a strong community, you can let your followers do the work by sharing their own produced content. Examples of user-generated content include reviews, customer photos and videos, brand mentions, and influencer-produced assets.
3. Post Frequently
Frequency and the time of post can impact the level of engagement. The perfect time of the day to post your content lies in determining the demographics of your target audience. Concentrating on your target demographic will help you determine the right opportunities and posting schedule to increase engagement with your posts.
Image from Hopper HQ
Regular posting on social media platforms is often a good rule of thumb (especially for startups and SMEs), which can significantly increase audience engagement while building brand awareness.
What Should Be Your Social Media Marketing Goal?
You may know about creating engaging and compelling content posts for your social media account, but does it align with your overall business objectives? Otherwise, your social media optimisation efforts will not contribute enough to achieve your brand’s real needs. You may be hitting the wrong target. It can be a waste of time and resources. So we must know what our direction is and its values to secure our effort and align them well through setting goals to make everything count.
SMO & Digital Marketing Channels – Taking Advantage of SMO for Omnichannel Marketing
SMO with Search Engine Optimisation
SMO is critical for the overall success of your digital marketing and your brand’s quest for a better online presence. Integrating SMO with SEO can improve your search engine rankings to reap more organic traffic by redirecting them to your site. You may want to use the most relevant phrases and keywords and utilise social media links on your site. To better understand more about SEO, you can read our Search Engine Optimisation Guide for 2023.
Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile (GBP) is one way of optimising and managing your digital visibility across the search engine that boosts your SEO strategy. It lets customers know more about your business information while enabling you to share updates, promotions, news and events related to your business. You can optimise GBP for SEO.
Adding your social media profiles to your GBP ensures the search engine sees the connection between your website and profile. You can add your social media profile to your GBP by adding your website link to GBP and then ensuring that your website link contains an external link to your social media profiles.
SMO is becoming increasingly relevant these days due to the ever-changing search engine algorithms. To rank higher on search engines, you can manage your social media page and redirect potential customers to your website. As a result, your website’s SEO rankings could improve over time.
However, having an excellent social media presence alone will not instantly boost your search engine rankings. SEO plays a vital role in improving your rankings in the long run. With SMO and SEO, your chances of succeeding are much higher.
SMO with Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is a form of paid online marketing strategy involving bidding on keywords to show your ads on search engine results pages or SERPs. It includes pay-per-click advertising and display ads. SEM and SMO complement well from a well-defined target audience and for remarketing.
You can tailor SEM into a strategy for retargeting audiences who visited a website but did not complete conversion action, such as adding items to the cart but did not make any purchases. You can run remarketing ads on social media platforms to help re-engage potential customers and encourage them to complete the action. Tools like Meta Pixel and Google Analytics can help track website visitor behaviours for tailoring remarketing campaigns.
SMO with Mobile Web Optimisation & Campaign Tracking
Businesses can add their website’s links to leverage their position on the platform and drive more web traffic to their site. Integrating these links that redirect them to the site’s product/service pages are effective practice to get them into the purchase funnel. However, it is also equally crucial to understand that many people use social media on mobile devices. With that in mind, the site’s page displays will look different than its desktop counterpart.
Since social media users on mobile devices would click the links shared on business’s socials, these potential customers upon clicking will be redirected to the mobile versions of business websites’ landing pages. Hence, mobile optimisation becomes necessary.. Mobile optimisation serves as a vital aspect of the strategy and optimisation success by ensuring your website is functional and well-optimised to run on mobile devices. Poorly optimised mobile sites lead to a decreased conversion with a higher bounce rate. Remember that SMO can benefit from interlinking your profile to your site to verify its connection/relevance. Web mobile optimisation ensures the following:
– Fast loading times
– Mobile-friendly interface
– Improved search engine ranking
– Better mobile-user experience
With better mobile web optimisation, users can share more links. However, it often warrants performance tracking and identifying traffic sources to ensure overall performance is on the right track. UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters serve as tags that you can use on your URLs to track social media traffic, analyse user behaviour, and identify the source and click paths. It allows you to measure the effectiveness of your SMO and online marketing efforts so you can further make meaningful optimisation to make the most out of your campaign.
Conclusion
SMO is an essential part of every social media advertising campaign. You have to optimise your content and page to generate more leads regardless of your preferred social media platform. Nevertheless, it would not suffice to strengthen your digital presence alone, no matter how arduous your efforts may be. Using SMO strategies together with multiple channels can strengthen your overall advertising and marketing effort and ultimately drive your business success online!
Contact our social media marketing agency at 6391-0930 and discover what you need to achieve for your marketing goals with a specialist.
