Over the past several years, social media has come to dominate conversations about digital marketing. The rise of social media as an online influencer has been dramatic and has happened quite quickly. In traditional media, the concept of word of mouth has always been respected as one of the most influential forms of marketing. In the Internet age, word of mouth now happens online, via social media. When your friends recommend things, you listen. When they share and like things, you notice. The concepts are as old as marketing itself, but the tools are new.

Social media optimization — or SMO, as it’s often called in this book — is a marketing discipline that focuses on creating effective social media. This book starts with the assumption that you’re already onboard with the idea of social media, but now you want to find out how to work with social media better, faster, and more effectively. Over the course of these pages, we share with you our experiences in managing social media, and try to communicate the lessons we’ve learned and explain the tools we’ve used. The goal of this book is to help you build a social media practice that gets results and doesn’t make you nuts in the process.

The one given that you have to keep in mind is that social media is a fast-changing, fluid area. New tools will arise. New channels will take on importance. Books, by contrast, are largely static things. After you read this book, the burden is on you to make an attempt to stay abreast of things in this field and to keep your eyes open for new techniques and tools that you can fold into your practice.

About This Book

Social media has the potential to be rather overwhelming. The sheer volume of channels is daunting. After you pick your channels, the experience is still a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose; the amount of information pouring out can be phenomenal. This book is about taming the beast. It’s about how to approach social media marketing, how to find the right channels and the right tools, and how to use them to your advantage.

As you read this book, you should be thinking about how the techniques and tools discussed can be integrated into your practice. Throughout the book, we make an effort to discuss different implementations, but every person has different priorities, abilities, and resources. This book can’t be a one-size-fits-all text — and it doesn’t try to be. Instead, the book highlights underlying principles and then shows how they can be implemented in various scenarios using a variety of tools. In other words, a philosophy is at work here, and you need to think about how it’s relevant to your work. Don’t get caught up in mechanical application of examples; rather, think about the underlying principles and how you can apply them to your needs.

Note the following text formatting conventions:

• Bolded text should be typed exactly as it appears in the book. The exception is when you’re working through a step list: Because each step is bold, the text to type is not bold.
• Web addresses and programming code appear in monofont. If you’re reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, note that you can click the web address to visit that website, like this: www.dummies.com.

Foolish Assumptions

The world is full of assumptions, some foolish and some not. Here are ours:

• You’re interested in social media marketing.
• You have some experience with things like Facebook and Twitter.
• You want to be an effective social media marketer.
• You’re comfortable working with a browser and capable of executing common tasks.

Icons Used in This Book

The icons you see in the sidebar of the text signal important additional pieces of information.

The Tip icon marks tips (duh!) and shortcuts that you can use to make life easier.

Remember icons mark the information that’s especially important to know. To siphon off the most important information in each chapter, just skim the text that has these icons.

The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature that you normally can skip.

The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you headaches or help you avoid disaster.

Beyond the Book

You can find more information than what’s available in the pages of this book. On the Dummies.com website you can find a number of resources that supplement the book and provide you with more information about social media optimization:

• Cheat Sheet: The Cheat Sheet (www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/socialmediaoptimization) for this book includes at-a-glance references for common social media tasks.
• Dummies.com online articles: Visit Dummies.com for additional articles on social media optimization, including tips on how to add images to your tweets, how to put a Facebook Like Box on your web page, and how to get started with Hootsuite. You will also find a helpful list of free social media analytics tools. To read these articles, visit (www.dummies.com/extras/socialmediaoptimization).

Where to Go from Here

One of the neat things about For Dummies books is that they’re not purely linear — that is, you’re not expected to start on page 1 and read the book in sequence to understand things. For Dummies books are meant to be more like reference books, in the sense that you can start anywhere. If Chapter 8 looks interesting to you, great; start there. Everything you need to know about the things discussed in Chapter 8 is included in Chapter 8. The same is true of the other chapters, of course; each is self-contained.

That said, for those of you who are looking for a quick start, we’ve included a chapter especially for you. If you need to get a social media campaign up and running today, start with Chapter 3.

Part I

Getting Started with Social Media Optimization

Visit www.dummies.com/go/socialmediaoptimization for additional For Dummies content and resources.

In this part …

• Formulating a definition of SMO
• Understanding the connection between SEO and SMO
• Getting started with your social media campaigns

Defining SMO

Social media optimization — or SMO, as it is often called — is a marketing discipline that emphasizes a holistic approach to social media and website content management. Typically, SMO is used to drive traffic to a website or to raise awareness of a product, a promotion, or an event. Due to its close ties to websites and search engine optimization, SMO is often defined to include efforts to improve a website’s social media effectiveness through the use of techniques such as content optimization and social sharing.

Social media optimization is a fairly recent concept in the world of digital marketing. Although the use of social media in digital marketing is well established, the concept of SMO is relatively new. In terms of distinguishing SMO from traditional social media marketing, SMO is more deliberate than traditional ad hoc social media marketing efforts and more closely integrated with efforts to market your website. SMO isn’t purely about what you post in your social media profiles. SMO crosses boundaries. It’s concerned with social media management, but it’s also a philosophy of content management and website marketing, and it encompasses planning and executing a strategy designed to cross channels.

In terms of practice, SMO is an interesting mix of art and science. Although quantifiable concepts — such as page views, social shares, likes, and retweets — are key elements of SMO, so are less analytical skills. Important soft skills include social engagement — that is, the ability to interact directly with your audience via social media channels and the ability to craft creative and compelling content. The objective aspects of SMO are the subject of several great tools, such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, but the subjective skills are not only hard to quantify, but also hard to teach. In this regard, SMO values and rewards practitioners who have a mix of both practical analytic skills and soft skills that allows them to read an audience.

Many people find SMO to be rewarding. You get to work with a variety of dynamic channels, and you get to interact directly with the audience. If you’re setting out to be an SMO practitioner, you need to cultivate both sides of your brain. Your analytical side needs to be able to create and justify a strategy, execute implementation of that strategy, read the analytics, and then feed that information into your plan. Your social side needs to be able to read an audience; anticipate their needs; and interact with them at an authentic, personal level.

Understanding the essential elements

SMO requires a mix of tools and skills. The good news is that you have a great deal of flexibility; there’s no single definitive tool kit. Each SMO practitioner has his or her own favorite tools and pet techniques. If you ask a variety of people about the “essential elements” of SMO, you’ll always get different opinions. That said, a few things are likely to be common to those opinions. Effective SMO requires the following things, at minimum:

• Social media profiles on the appropriate channels
• Access to the publishing controls for the social media channels
• Administrative access to your website
• Access to analytics data for your website
• Access to analytics data for your social media channels, such as Facebook Insights (shown in Figure 1-1)
• Willingness to make the effort needed to interact with your audience
• Time!

As you can see, the list of essential elements is a mix of data tools and soft skills. The list is intentionally generic, because what is required for any particular campaign varies by the nature of the client, the audience, and the goals of the campaign.

Your social media tool kit is an area on which you can spend as much or as little as you want. An increasing number of commercial services are targeting SMO practitioners, and some of these services are quite attractive. Many practitioners use automated publishing tools or at least scheduling software that lets them prepare posts in advance for publication later; others add content and influencer discovery tools to their tool kits.

For most practitioners, the choice of tools largely depends on the following:

• Budget
• Personal preference
• Prioritization of needs
• Channel selection

Crafting the right tool kit is a personal decision. Many tools offer free trial periods. The best way to find what works for you is a hands-on trial. Be willing to experiment.

Connecting social media with your web presence

One of the most common uses for social media is as a means of strengthening your web presence. Social media can be very effective in both raising awareness of your website and driving traffic to the site. A properly cultivated SMO strategy can enhance what you’re doing on your website and deliver tangible results.

The connection between your social media channels and your web presence goes in both directions. Social media can benefit your website, and your website can strengthen your social media efforts. Integration of your social media activity with your web strategy is a key component of SMO. Your website should be not only a focal point for social media activity, but also an outlet for the content you publish on your social media channels. Your website can also serve to create new followers for your social media profiles by pushing traffic to those profiles. You can even leverage the social networks of your site’s visitors by implementing on your website popular sharing functionality from networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Figure 1-2 shows how a site can integrate content from the social media channels and use sharing buttons to help promote the website’s content.

The connection between your web presence and your social media constitutes a virtuous circle. Your web presence and your social media presence complement and strengthen each other. Through strategic use of your various publishing platforms, you can leverage your efforts across channels, reinforce your message, and provide a richer experience for your audience.

Seeing What SMO Can Do for You

SMO can be tailored to a variety of tasks. To ask what SMO can do for you is to ask what social media can do for you. Indeed, anything you set out to do with social media, you can do more effectively through proper application of the principles of SMO. As its name implies, SMO is about optimizing your social media efforts, making them more efficient and more effective in achieving your goals.

Among the proven uses of social media are the following:

• Raising brand awareness
• Driving traffic to a website
• Improving search engine visibility
• Improving customer service
• Increasing brand loyalty
• Protecting and enhancing brand reputation
• Managing crises
• Generating leads

When you apply SMO tools and techniques to your social media efforts, you see the following benefits:

• Improved efficiency
• Time saving
• Better planning
• More structured execution of social media techniques
• Increased leverage of your efforts
• More comprehensive feedback and analysis of social media efforts
• Lower susceptibility to burnout

Put another way, SMO is a process improvement. It’s largely about imposing on your existing ad hoc practice a more methodical, measured practice, with an emphasis on cost/benefit analysis and extending your reach without outrunning your ability to engage with the audience. By considering from the outset the need for integration of your social media marketing with your website content marketing, you can deliver more benefits with less effort.

Making a Commitment to SMO

Regardless of whether you’re an individual looking to use social media for personal purposes or an employee of an organization that runs multiple social media profiles, successful SMO requires a commitment of time, budget, and human resources.

SMO also requires harmonization of your digital and physical marketing efforts. The SMO practitioner must not work in isolation or else opportunities are missed and true optimization is impossible. Your social media efforts need to work hand in hand with your web content efforts, your email marketing efforts, and any traditional media efforts; all your efforts are about consistency and the ability to get your message to the audience via the channels they prefer. To that end, a commitment to SMO means a commitment to working across channels to execute a comprehensive strategy and achieve agreed goals.

Finding Your Voice

One of the key attributes of success in social media is the creation of a human connection. Social media’s strengths are in its personal character. People use the channels that suit them, and they like and share content that inspires them. When they decide to engage with an individual or a brand, they make a personal connection.

As a social media practitioner, you must keep the emphasis on the personal touch. You have to be the voice of your company or brand. You’re the first point of contact — the one speaking for the brand. It’s essential that you create and maintain an authentic and appropriate voice for the company or brand, which is key to positioning and key to generating meaningful interaction that speaks to your audience and shapes their perceptions.

Taking the time to define the voice of your brand is an important exercise that pays real dividends. If your firm hasn’t already defined its voice, make that exercise a priority. Defining your brand has real advantages:

• It shows your audience the people behind the company.
• It makes it possible for individuals to make a personal connection with your company.
• It can separate your company from the competition.
• It builds trust.
• It makes it possible for you to be an influencer and a resource for your audience.

Put a face on your brand. People like to have something to talk about, but even more, they appreciate having someone to talk to.

In the field of social media, finding your voice is one of the most challenging topics, but it’s not easily quantifiable. There’s no statistic to track or feature to tweak. This classic soft skill requires the right person. The skill isn’t easy to teach, but it’s something you can practice. With planning and practice, you’ll get better at speaking in an authentic voice that reflects your company values.

After you establish voice and tone guidelines, turn them into a set of guidelines for your practitioners.

Creating a Business Case

Although a number of companies have tried social media in some form, many have failed to commit the resources it takes to do it well. Often, the problem isn’t a lack of awareness of social media; rather, it’s lack of belief that a commitment of resources will deliver results. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Vine, Vimeo, Instagram — the list goes on and on and on, and it is easy to understand why the doubters have their doubts. The scope of the topic is a bit much to grasp, and it’s natural to think that getting anything done is going to take a tremendous amount of time and resources.

The truth is that it does take time and resources to make a difference with social media, but that fact shouldn’t stop you. The rewards can more than compensate for the effort required. What you need are a good plan and the resources to make it work. The first step for most people is making the business case that will motivate your firm to allocate the resources you need.

Selling social channels internally is best done in business terms. Define your vision and your goals; then map your goals to your firm’s business strategy. You may find it tempting to talk in terms of the number of followers you’ll gain or how many retweets you can get, but that approach is likely to meet with a lukewarm response. Instead, take out the social media jargon. The result you’re seeking isn’t about the channel. Draw attention to how your plan will advance the company’s strategic business goals.

When you make your business case, focus on results, not on social media buzzwords.

For many decision-makers, a road map approach works well. Creating a visual road map for planning purposes is really quite easy. In short, you simply explain what you’ll attack first, what comes next, and so on. Explain how long implementing your plan will take and what resources you need; always make the link back to the firm’s business strategy. A visual road map lays things out in a fashion that reduces complexity and helps decision-makers see how the various elements of your strategy are connected. Moreover, a road map that lays things out on a timeline map helps manage expectations and gets people to think about the necessity for a consistent commitment over time.

If you look at creating a roadmap as a process, you could attack it like this:

1. Use a software program to make a table.

   You can use whatever program suits your work style best, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, or Microsoft Excel.

   We like to use Excel for this task. The default Excel columns/rows format works nicely for linear sequences. In most other programs, you have to create a table with as many rows and columns as you expect to use. Using Excel saves seconds!

2. Create a Channel heading for the left column.

3. Add column headings for the time periods that make sense for your campaign.

   In the example Excel road map shown in Figure 2-1, we lay out a 10-week campaign. Create ten columns labeled sequentially: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and so on, up to Week 10.

4. In the Channel column, add rows for each channel’s activities in the campaign.

   The example shown in Figure 2-1 has rows for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. The Facebook channel includes two activities: Sponsored Posts and Content.

   If you’re running multiple activities on a channel simultaneously, you need multiple rows. If you want to run a contest on Facebook, for example, but also want to run a Facebook Sponsored Posts campaign, you need two rows.

5. In each activity row, enter the tasks planned for each week.

   Include the start and stop dates of the initiatives, as well as periodic reviews. In Figure 2-1, the Facebook content launches in Week 3 and runs until Week 4. In that case you note the event across all the weeks in between.

6. Repeat Step 5 for each key task and periodic reviews.

   You now have a visual timeline that communicates what you plan to do with each activity during each week of the campaign.

Come up with a coherent color-coding scheme for your timeline to make it more visual and easier to grasp at a glance. In the road map shown in Figure 2-1, the Facebook activities are blue, the Twitter activities are yellow, and so on.

When laying out your plan, don’t forget to highlight the risks. No plan is without risks. Discuss the risks, show you grasp them, and explain how they can be minimized. Often, this part of your pitch is the key. Failing to acknowledge risk and have a plan to deal with it is often perceived by experienced management as being naïve and a sign of poor diligence.

Creating a solid business case can get you the resources you need and create the sort of internal consensus that gives you the flexibility to adapt and to execute your plan effectively in a fluid marketing environment. You have to know what resources to ask for, of course, as well as what you expect to come from your efforts.

Determining needed resources

Effective execution of a social media strategy requires time, effort and energy. Although the right tools can make life easier, there’s no way around the fact that you need to set aside time for social media and that it requires personal commitment. Social media is personal media; it’s about connecting with individuals in a manner that’s genuine and true to your brand values. As such, it can’t be automated. You can’t set it and forget it.

The most important resource you need to create social media success is the human touch.

In the most basic terms, the resources you need can be grouped into three categories: time, creative resources, and software tools.

Time

Time is a valuable commodity and often the most expensive component of a social media initiative. You not only need to invest in planning, but also must remain available to manage the execution. A social media campaign isn’t like an old-school media campaign, in which the job is largely done as soon as the artwork is off to the printer. Social media is fluid. It requires constant adjustment and the ability to respond both appropriately and in a timely fashion. It also requires a strong sense of engagement. You need to find the time and the focus to make it work. Start by setting aside an hour a day to find out what you can get done in that amount of time. Adjust your schedule, and be willing to spend additional time when you have a chance to engage with your audience.

Creative resources

Creative resources are next on your shopping list. A great social media campaign is backed up by great content. Your Facebook posts, your tweets, and your other text content should be planned and reviewed before you post them. Although you must be flexible and willing to improvise, the key points of the content need to be planned in advance. If you’re not a great writer, find one.

Visual media is also a highly effective social media asset. If you can tap artists who create great imagery — photos, charts, infographics, videos, and so on — you’ll be one step ahead of the competition. Like creative text, imagery takes planning and time for execution. You should try to set aside budget for imagery if you aren’t able to create it yourself.

Software tools

Software tools can help lighten the load and make your work more effective. Before you get started, you may want to build your tool kit. Here’s a starter list of tools that can handle your basic needs:

• To help you manage multiple accounts and schedule your posts, try Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com) (shown in Figure 2-2); it’s a good choice with both free and subscription options. Hootsuite provides multiple-account management for both Twitter and Facebook. The premium version enables you to share account administration duties.
• To detect mentions of your brand or product on various social channels, use a tool like Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts) or Social Mention (http://socialmention.com).
• To track the effect of your Facebook efforts, you need access to the Facebook Page Insights included with your Facebook Page.
• To track your success on Twitter, use the Twitter stats feature provided on Twitter.com.
• To assess the effect of your work on your website, you need access to your website analytics program. If you don’t have one, try Google Analytics (http://google.com/analytics); it’s free and easy to implement.

These suggestions are the minimum tools you need for your social media tool kit. You can add many more, though, assuming that it makes sense to take the time to learn the technologies and you have the budget for them.