As more companies embrace social media, the chatter about return on investment, or ROI, has amplified as executives attempt to determine whether the money they’re spending is worth it. In theory, it’s a good exercise but given it is still early days for social media, it is a challenge to accurately quantity its impact right now.
Rather than focus on ROI, companies should be looking long and hard at SMO – social media optimization.
So, what is SMO? One way to define is that SMO is a focus on making sure that a company’s social media activities are as efficient and effective as possible. It means creating content – be it blog posts, tweets, videos or Facebook updates – that can be easily used and leveraged across multiple social media platforms.
It means making sure a company’s social media person or team is highly productive so that their day-day-day activities are focused and productive as opposed to having a scattered shot-gun approach that consumes too many cycles.
One of the best ways to jump-start SMO is taking advantage of the wide variety of tools that can automate social media activity and extend the reach of your content with no or little manual effort.
For example, TwitterFeed is a easy way to link an RSS feed to Twitter so that every time you have a new blog post, it automatically creates tweet.
Ping.fm is another excellent tool to quickly content to distribute updates to dozens of social media platforms – everything from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn, Flickr, Friendfeed, MySpace and Ning.
Hootsuite is a Twitter publishing tool with lots of great features, including the ability to schedule tweets, which means you can create a bunch of tweets at one time, and then have them appear throughout the day.
The underlying theme is using tools to make social media work for you as opposed to working social media. This is not to suggest that social media doesn’t require a consistent and sustained effort but there are lot of ways to optimize how you use social media.
So, let’s have more discussions about SMO to complement the growing obsession with ROI.
For another take on SMO, check out Oren Todoros’ post on “Max Your Brand With 4 Social Media Optimization Tips”.
Tags: ROI, SMO, Social Media, social media optimization
Great post! But some questions…”In theory, it’s a good exercise but given it is still early days for social media, it is a challenge to accurately quantity its impact right now.”
Can you really call it the ‘early days’ when Facebook overtakes the 2nd biggest search engine for traffic (and 2nd most trafficked site period)? Totally agreed that optimizing your content distribution is vital and that accurately quantifying impact is a challenge…but that’s not to say it can’t be done! The only way we’l break the ‘early days’ is when the marketing decision makers see the value in putting dollars towards social media marketing. And how will they take that plunge? With clearly defined impact in dollars and sense.
[...] It means making sure a company’s social media person or team is highly productive so that their day-day-day activities are focused and productive as opposed to having a scattered shot-gun approach that consumes too many cycles. via blog.sysomos.com [...]
I definitely agree. The more you can automate the publishing of your content, the more time you will have to engage with your community about that content. These tools also assist in the search for finding other people talking about similar topics in your industry as well. Finding the right combination of tools that work for you will allow you to increase your level of productivity which will positively affect your ROI long term.
The list of tools that have been developed to help automate social media continues to grow daily. From the three listed above to CoTweet, SocialOomph, TweetLater… the list goes on. However, these tools are only a crutch in aiding the pushing of the content. The SMO (if you will) originates in the actual content – where it is sourced from, what you are saying, what key words you are using and how it resonates with your readers. Generating the right content that people want to read and engage with is key and will ultimately be your SMO (or ROI) driver. Like Laura said, these tools will assist you and help generate a positive ROI because they will give you time to focus on the key pieces such as content aggregation and social engagement.
This is happening on the brand/marketing side as well. Lots of talk about publishing across platforms, etc.
There’s a company called thisMoment, who produce what they call a “distributed engagement channel”, where they take the big social media hubs, add UGC and commenting, and put them under one roof.
Interesting idea, and got them an article in AdAge. The article then set off a flurry of comments and rebuttals, on the topic of silo creation. The AdAge article has been archived but can be easily searched if you’re a member. Also here’s a link to the “channel” they did for the movie “Kick-Ass”, which was what the AdAge piece was about:
http://kickass.thismoment.com/
Thanks.
–Ben