What exactly is social media?

“The online tools and platforms that people user to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other.”

Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis and vlogs, or video blogs.

What is Social Media Optimization?

Social Media Optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. The basic aim for optimizing your social media is to build an audience, then participate in the ready-made communities that are all over the internet.

The concept behind SMO is simple: Implement changes to optimize a site so it is:

• easily linked to by other websites.
• highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati)
• more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

Social media is considered to be anything that can allow an online community to communicate, such as photos, videos and blogs. Websites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook and Revver all fit the bill. Take advantage of these communities to market your business! Spreading messages through blog posts and blog search engines works very well. It is all about creating something that is easy to spread. While practicing social media optimization you should be beware that this is pull marketing; it is not “push your message onto consumers marketing.”

Social media optimization is, in many ways, connected to the technique of viral marketing. Word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through social bookmarking, blogs and photo and video sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines such as Technorati.

Without knowing your audience there’s no way you can offer them a helpful tool or a compelling piece of content. You need to consider what actions will produce the strongest reaction and use the least amount of resources. Take into account what your desired outcome is. Are you looking for increased conversions, traffic, links, industry credibility and brand recognition? All of this will be vital in helping you plan your optimizing techniques.

Effective Social Media Optimization Techniques

Some of the best social media optimizing techniques are:

Viral Video: An optimized, uploaded video will often continue attracting self-selected viewers who are likely to be interested in your content, products or services.

Social Bookmarks: A social bookmarking service takes the idea of your browser’s bookmarking feature and posts it online for you to share with anyone.

Blogging / Podcasting / Video Blogging: Blogs, podcasts or video blogs are all excellent ways to build a community around your content. Optimizing your blog presence will help expose your content to the widest targeted audience.

Event Marketing: If your organization holds regular public events such as conferences, seminars or speakers, promote them online with calendar sharing services such as Google Calendar and Upcoming.org. Optimizing your event listings will create another channel through which you can find new attendees.

Benefits of social media optimization

The real benefit of optimizing your site for social media is that it inspires you to create excellent, keyword-rich content, which in turn can help build your online and offline brand, increase quality inbound links, help you become a subject matter expert and expose your content to thousands of new visitors. It reinforces what you should be working towards through your search engine optimization campaign. Some other benefits which can be of great help are:

• Brand Awareness
• Lead Generation
• Event Promotion
• Blogging Platform
• Local / Regional / National focus
• Customer Loyalties

Suggestions for Social Media Optimization (SMO):

• Increase your linkability
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy
• Reward inbound links
• Help your content travel
• Encourage the mash up

Tools for Social Media Optimization

Following are some of the tools used to optimize the social media:

Social Bookmarker Creator – The first tool is Social Bookmark Creator. This tool is used in order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service. The tool allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/08/new-tools-for-social-media-optimization/

RSS Button Maker – The second tool is the RSS Button Maker. When you use this a list of the top RSS readers folds out so you can subscribe using your favorite reader.

Both of these tools help conserve screen real estate and also help to socialize blogs.

Conclusion – Always concentrate on producing good social media contents and then adapt all the possible ways to optimize your media so that it can generate good traffic and act as a powerful marketing campaign for your business.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#cite_note-0
2. http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/introduction-to-social-media-optimization.html
3. http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/the-dark-side-of-social-media-organization/
4. http://e-strategy.com/internetmarketing.asp?section=Services&topic=minnesota-social-media-optimization-smo-services
5. http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/08/13/rules-of-social-media-optimization/

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Related posts:

1. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING VS SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
2. SMM- ROI Metrics and Analysis