SMO: How to Strengthen Your Brand Presence on Social Media

SMO (social media optimization) is the process of improving a brand's presence on social media to enhance its visibility, content sharing, and website traffic. The goal is to make profiles and content easy to find, view, and share. The term originated in 2006, first coined by Danny Sullivan.

What is the purpose of SMO

The main goal of SMO is to drive more people to your website and increase your brand's visibility on social media through organic content distribution, without paid advertising. It may address several tasks simultaneously:

Awareness. People hear about you more often and remember you better. Regular interaction on social media makes your brand more visible, increasing trust and appeal.
Engagement. People actively engage with the content: they like, share, comment, and debate. This, in turn, creates a community of loyal followers.
Website traffic. Social media posts with engaging content and convenient links drive people to your website and landing pages, increasing conversions and leads.
Reputation and trust. Consistent presence and prompt responses to reviews and questions help mitigate negativity, clear misunderstandings, and strengthen your brand's image.

How to use SMO properly

For SMO to be effective, several basic principles are essential. The first "5 rules" were formulated by Rohit Bhargava:

1. Create shareable content. Useful and engaging content is the foundation of SMO: this includes articles, videos, infographics, checklists. If people enjoy forwarding it to their friends or posting it on their own, you are more likely to get more links and reposts, resulting in reach growth.

2. Simplify sharing. Include prominent "Share" buttons and widgets on your website to make sharing a one-click process.

3. Encourage activity. Reward users for interacting with your content: a bonus for a subscription, a discount for a repost, an exclusive access for a review. Even simple incentives may increase the number of likes, comments, and shares, and over time lead to a more lively dialogue with the brand.

4. Distribute content across multiple platforms. No need to limit yourself to your website: cross-post to multiple social networks, publish guest posts, upload videos, and participate in industry forums. More channels mean greater reach and a stronger impact.

5. Encourage user-generated content. Ask people to create their own versions of your content: reviews, remixes, challenges, flash mobs with your brand hashtag. Reinforce this with contests and tagging creators. When your audience creates and distributes such content, you gain organic reach and create more points of contact with your brand.

In this article, we discuss how to motivate people to create content for your brand.

These rules make the website more social. Take care of the basics: allow people to comment (including via social media accounts), display "Like" and "Share" counters, and enable social media plugins such as comment widgets and social media login. All of this simplifies interaction and helps visitors become part of your community.

How SMO differs from SEO and SMM

The concepts of SMO, SEO, and SMM are closely related to digital marketing, but they pursue different goals and utilize different methods.

SMO vs. SEO

SEO is about search visibility, while SMO is about the visibility and attractiveness of content on social media. While SEO helps people find your website, SMO helps your content find people. SEO is like a marathon: you optimize the website for search engines and accumulate rankings over time. SMO often provides quick bursts of traffic and engagement, but requires constant activity to maintain interest. Ideally, they should work together: high-quality, SEO-optimized content is easily and readily shared on social media thanks to SMO, and the overall marketing impact increases.

SMO vs. SMM

SMM promotion (social media marketing) involves daily active engagement on social media. The team develops a content plan, creates posts and stories, launches ads, communicates with subscribers, and runs contests and special projects. The goal is to quickly convey the offer, gain reach, generate leads and sales. Paid tools and methods are often used — targeted advertising, promo posts, collaborations with bloggers. Typical metrics include reach, engagement, CTR, cost per click, cost per lead, ROAS, and subscriber growth.

SMO makes all of the above easier and more effective. This includes profile and content customization: a neat header and avatar, a consistent visual identity, clear descriptions and links to social media and the website, pins, relevant hashtags, and section navigation. On the website, these include social media buttons, widgets, accurate previews, UTM tags, and user-friendly forms. Moderation procedures and a consistent tone of communications are also essential.

The SMO and SMM objectives are also different. SMM is a short-cycle tactic: "launch it and get a boost". SMO is an infrastructure and rules that produce a cumulative effect: content is easier to find, shared more readily, and the path to a lead is shorter.

How to use SMO

Optimize your social media profiles. Ensure all key platforms have consistent design. Use a unified username, a recognizable avatar and cover photo, and a neat profile header. The description should contain simple phrases with relevant keywords, clear positioning, and a website link. Add contact information and convenient communication methods: a "Contact" button, phone number, address, and a map. Keep the style consistent: brand colors, fonts, and tone of voice. Pin important posts (about a product, offer, or promotion), and offer content navigation: collections/relevant stories, and category hashtags. Include your business category, business hours, and geolocation to build trust and give people a quick understanding of your company. The result is a clear and coherent profile, while the path from social media to your website becomes shorter and easier to understand.

Add social media buttons and widgets to your website. Create prominent "Share" buttons so that any content can be sent to the feed with a single click. The easiest way is to use ready-made solutions such as ShareThis, AddToAny, and Shareaholic: these support multiple platforms and allow you to quickly customize the look and feel of your social media feeds. Consider widgets, too. A feed of recent social media posts, a "Like" button, a form for subscribing to a group or channel, a block with links to social media pages — all of these bring the "website ↔ social media" connection to life. If you have a repost counter, display it to make use of social proof.
Adapt your content for social media. Different platforms have different formats. Create eye-catching covers and clear headlines, and add short, useful descriptions with a call to action. Simplify your text, break it into paragraphs, and add emoji where appropriate. When adding a video, include subtitles since some people may watch it without sound.
Plan and maintain a rhythm. Social media profile engagement depends on consistency. Here, a content calendar comes in handy: schedule topics, formats, dates, and platforms in advance. To avoid relying on manual posting, use scheduled publishing and social media management services like Hootsuite and Buffer. They make it easy to schedule posts, cross-post to multiple networks at once, choose the best time to publish, and monitor responses. Build a database of "evergreen" posts and mix them with relevant news. Test headlines and first lines, change cover images, and try different text lengths. Use UTM tags and track what really drives clicks and engagement. If you encounter problems, adjust frequency, topics, and posting times. The bottom line is, a stable schedule + automation tools = less fuss and more efficiency in your SMM strategy.
Analytics and improvement. In SMO, it is important to continually measure results and adapt your approach based on the acquired data. Check the basic metrics: subscriber growth, reach, engagement (likes, comments, reposts), link clicks, video views, saves. Add business metrics: website traffic, conversion, leads, and sales from social traffic. For the website, connect Google Analytics (or an alternative), and use UTM tags on all links from posts and stories. This way, you will be able to recognize which platforms and formats drive traffic and leads. If you launch activities across multiple channels, think about attribution: compare last click and positional models to account for content that warms the audience in earlier stages. Narrow down the topics to what yields the most engagement and clickability, test covers and first lines, change the text length, posting times, and frequency. If short videos yield more saves, add them to your content plan. Such a systematic approach noticeably increases the returns from SMO and social media marketing in general over time.
Interactivity and UGC. Engage your audience in content creation: ask questions, run polls, organize contests, challenges, and flash mobs. The more user-generated content there is, the greater the brand's reach and trust. Regularly tag and repost the best reviews and followers' content with your brand hashtag. This is both a "thank you" to the authors and an example for others. Add clear rules of participation, a dedicated hashtag, and mentions of the authors in your posts: this way, people are more likely to engage, and the brand gets organic promotion.

Conclusion

SMO is not a one-time activity but a constant effort. It requires both creativity and technical skills: crafting useful content and correctly linking the website with social media. The result is increased traffic from social media, higher engagement, and a stronger reputation. SMO complements SMM and SEO: it helps achieve reach without ongoing advertising costs and shortens the user's path to taking action.