What to choose between SMO, SMA and marketing automation for your strategy?

SMO: advantages and disadvantages

SMO is the acronym for "Social Media Optimization". It refers to the optimisation of content published on social media. Indeed, social networks have become the most effective new marketing platforms. In other words, SMO is the application of all SEO techniques to social networks for marketing purposes. Hashtags, photos, GIFs, videos... all types of content on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and others are concerned.

The objective in SM0 is to bring more visibility and traffic to a publication, but especially to a professional profile. Just like SEO or SEA, this type of SEO follows strict rules, such as text size, image quality, captions or call-to-actions. It differs from these two SEO methods because it targets all Internet users without distinction.  

There are no age or gender groups or even specific interests to target. Social networks are then used to disseminate and promote your services or products or your website. There is also the traffic that creates backlinks, brings new subscribers, new customers and increases your online popularity. The benefits are thus numerous. 

However, it has its drawbacks: 

• Bad buzz: because of false optimisation, an ambiguous word choice or bad code, you can fall victim to negative viral content. This can cost you your reputation;
• Algorithm updates: algorithms are often updated to improve the use of social networks; 
• paid referencing: some updates involve monthly subscriptions, whereas the features concerned were previously free. 

ADM: advantages and disadvantages

SMA stands for "Social Media Advertising" or advertising on social networks. The objective is the same as that of SMO, as are the advantages. You use SEO techniques to optimise your content to increase your visibility. This creates traffic and attracts new followers. You will gain reputation and awareness quickly. 

So ADM is not so different from SMO. In fact, it is part of it, since SMO involves advertising on social media. Only it affects the paid part because the company is obliged to pay for an additional advertising feature. This can still be extra advertising space, streaming on the homepage of all potential targets, narrower targeting, etc. 

On Facebook, ADM allows a paid account to be seen on the news feed of all members of a group. Sometimes targeting is done by age, gender, occupation or location. This is absent in SMO. This is why it is called inbound marketing, because it seeks to gain direct traffic and direct customers without any intermediary, apart from the ad. It's the advertising method that varies. Everything must encourage a reaction: sharing, comments, curiosity, etc.

The disadvantages of ADM are the same as those of SMO. Publications can be overly engaging and invite interaction. They can be viral, but not always well received. This can generate a lot of traffic in a short time, but cause followers to unsubscribe. Your reputation can also suffer. As they are also ads, they will be subject to the rules of paid ads and updates. 

Automation: advantages and disadvantages

Automation consists of automating certain stages of a marketing campaign through the use of robots. Here, we use "social media bots", intelligible robots specially dedicated to social networks. It has the advantage of practicality. It avoids repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Everything that is time-consuming is assigned to a robot and the human task is reduced to a minimum. 

For business, it works because it saves time for other activities. You will thus be doubly efficient. Be careful, the bot must be profitable, otherwise it would be a loss-making investment. It is very effective if it is used wisely. It can improve your online visibility or your reputation and damage them. The boost can therefore be positive for a while and then regress.  

Other disadvantages are the "automatic" nature of the communication. Customers sometimes need human contact rather than automatic responses. Even if the feedback is personalised, it may not be well received. The cost of this type of service is also very high, in addition to the many settings required. You should hire a specialist whose service can be even more expensive. 

To help you with your outreach marketing campaign, your marketing automation or your social network marketing, My Name is Bond offers you its services. This web agency knows all the tricks of the trade to get you on the first page of search engines. And this, whatever the chosen advertising strategy.