Social Media Optimization

Overview

Social media optimization (SMO) is a technique that helps generate publicity for a business or product using social networking sites, blogs, and online websites. This technique helps organizations achieve a high search engine ranking and increase traffic.

SMO includes adding news widgets, RSS feeds, blogging, and sharing videos and images. Popular sites for social media optimization include Digg, Del.icio.us, YouTube, Orkut, Newsvine, StumbleUpon, Flickr, MySpace, Shadows, Twitter, Blogs, and Facebook.

SMO can bring many people to your website through a variety of channels. Social media optimization requires knowing how to target audiences, creating content, planning a SMO strategy, book marking and tagging, and increasing your linkability (how many sites link to your website). SMO should be a continuous process that increases traffic to your website.

Social media optimization is relatively inexpensive since most social media sites are free. There are some tutorials that cost around $100, which you can use to learn techniques. You can work with consulting or advertising firms, or you can conduct your social media optimization in house.

Benefits

Social media optimization can be used to raise a website's popularity through online communities. It is a great tool for branding due to its penetration in the target market. SMO keeps people informed about changes in your company so that you can recruit and retain customers. This technique is one of the cheapest methods of Internet marketing. It can also be used for direct marketing and sales purposes. SMO helps companies to build an online reputation by facilitating a direct interaction with consumers.

How It Works

Social media optimization implements changes to your website that can be easily linked to visible social media searches on custom search engines. There are four steps to take when optimizing your website. The first step is to make your website more dynamic. Many sites are static, this means that they are rarely updated and are used for storage purposes only. To optimize a website for social media, you need to increase the linkability of the content by adding blogs posts and press releases.

You'll also want to add tags in the HTML of your pages. You can select popular keywords that people would be searching. You can also track of who refers your website. You can give a commission to the social media sites that direct traffic to you.

Finally, let others use your content. You must actively promote content through submissions to social media and relevant sites. This seems to be more convenient if the content is produced in a portable format like PDF, video, and audio files. Then make it easy for visitors to visit your website by adding links, tags, and bookmarks.

Companies/Brands

USA Web Solutions, Awareness Networks, and SSPR provide social media optimization services.