Social media optimization (SMO) is a digital marketing strategy that helps businesses grow their online presence and achieve their goals. It's important because it can : SMO can help drive traffic to a website by creating content that's easily shared and promoted on social media SMO can help improve search engine rankings by increasing social media activity. For example, search engines consider the number of times a link has been shared when ranking a page SMO can help generate leads and sales by attracting prospects and encouraging them to make purchasing decisions to increase awareness of new products and services, connect with customers, and mitigate potentially damaging news.