SMO or SEO – Which one is more effective for small businesses

Social Media Optimization or SMO is a term that is being used repetitively these days even though many people still do not know the meanings or more importantly, the enormous scope of Social Media Marketing. The idea behind SMO is the same that worked behind SEO and that is to generate more and more traffic, hence increasing the leads for your business, doesn’t matter if it is online of offline. The increasing popularity of Social Media has sparked a new debate, just like there’s a battle between social networks (Facebook) and Search Engine (Google), there’s a debate as to which one is more effective, Social Media Optimization (SMO) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Just as is the case the case with new techniques and strategies, there are two schools of thoughts, let us try and find out, the more cost effective medium for a small business.

How good is SMO?

There are businesses which are increasingly inclined towards the social media and the strategies involved in optimizing and maximizing the exposure on various social communities. In reality SMO works, not only as a great source of pulling in traffic, but it also has many other advantages like higher conversion rate and return on investment. As opposed to SEO, SMO is a more targeted and engaging kind of optimization. Despite the fact that marketing social networks, such as Facebook, has little SEO value, more and more web masters are now concentrating on such social media in order to engage people and make sales.

How good is SEO?

The SMO strategies have seemed to work for many people but they are certainly not for all types for businesses. For example, the majority of Facebook users are young adults and college going teens, so any product that doesn’t cater to this age group will find it hard to be the centre of attention. A more useful method in this scenario will be the good old SEO. Other than generating a lot of traffic for your website, the SEO techniques are very cost effective.

So which one is better for small businesses?

If we do a quick comparison, we will see that SMO is a little cheaper than SEO, and it can produce results faster than SEO, however SEO is a more long term and far more effective technique in terms of overall results. Besides, SMO is easy to adapt, however you will have to learn the basics of SEO.

The truth is that neither SMO nor SEO can do you any good without being backed the other one. The secret of success lies somewhere in the middle of SEO and SMO, which means you should try to strike a balance between both of these techniques in order to reap maximum benefit out of both the SMO and the SEO. You have got to invest in both SMO and SEO since both the techniques serve quite different purposes.

This article was posted by Susan Smith. Susan is a wholesale and B2B marketing expert. She writes frequently on the topics related to dropshipping, distributors, wholesalers and trade suppliers.