Social Media Management or SMO: Which is Right for Your Brand?

Social media can be hard to keep up with in order to stay relevant, especially when managing multiple accounts for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and beyond.

For larger companies, entire departments are devoted to relentlessly monitoring the company’s social media presence, with different teams dedicated to posts, likes, reposts, shares, and comments. But for small and medium businesses, you might not have the staffing resources or budgetary abilities to monitor this behemoth, and a third party with expertise to focus on social media strategy might be the way to go.

For brands looking to find a way to stay relevant without straining their staff or pocketbook, there’s two choices: social media optimization or social media management. Which option is best for your company? Let’s take a look and see what path best fits your company’s strategy.

Social Media Management Platforms

Social media management platforms are software tools that reduce the time and energy required to produce social media posts. This option is great for publishing a large volume of content and having the most activity on your channels.

Some organizations set up social media management platforms to tackle posts on all social media apps at once. This method is great for small companies that have small budgets or brands who can’t dedicate entire teams to the social media beast.

With so many management companies and softwares out there, it can be hard to decide which to select. This is a case of diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks. Hootsuite might offer more growth than Sprout, but for others, TweetDeck blows MeetEdgar out of the water. Check the plans each company offers and find which fits your budget and your strategy plan for creating an effective social media presence.

SMO

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is when you measure, analyze, and learn from the few social media posts you create. This option is ideal when you want to maximize the impact and quality of your posts at a lower volume.

SMO is an option for brands that prefer a more hands-off approach. An SMO service is the SEO of social media, used to attract new customers to your website and ultimately, your business. And much like SEO, SMO (also known as social SEO) is pretty important. So, how can SMO help you?

• Creating shareable content. SMO takes a closer look at your content and making sure people like it and want to share it.
• When optimizing, your content can go further through the power of social media, especially now that sharing through social media affects content greater than traditional backlinking.
• Inbound links turn into engagement and a reward. We all like getting rewarded for our actions, which a Social Media Optimization Service can help.
• Keeping tabs on analytics and other fancy-sounding charts to make sure your social media campaign is working becomes easier with SMO. Or, if you don’t keep tabs and just wish for the best, SMO can start a foundation of free or cheap analytic tools to start with.

Finally, ever heard of HubSpot? Social media strategies all over, regardless of tactic, use this software to see significant boosts in both social media management and optimization, but, just like individual SMO or social media management softwares, there are plenty of players to choose from.

So, how has social media changed your company? Are you utilizing SMO, a social media management software, or just winging it and hoping for the best?