Social Media Optimization

Social media refers to a group of Internet-based applications that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Social media is the platform for social media marketing, which basically means the utilization of social media for the promotion and publication of products and services. Social media marketing relies on the internet users for the success of an advertisement campaign. Replication of a message through person to person contact is far more effective than the traditional methods of advertising. Social Media Optimization is a substantial component of social media marketing.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for attracting visitors to website content by promoting and publicizing it through social media. Social media optimization is one of two online methods of optimizing (or attracting visitors to) website content; the other method is known as search engine optimization (SEO).

Social media optimization is further divided into two groups:

1. Social media features added to the content itself, including: RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos
2. Promotional activities in social media aside from the content being promoted, including: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles

The six cardinal rules for conducting social media optimization includes: Increasing your linkability, making tagging and bookmarking easy, rewarding inbound links, helping your content travel, encouraging the mashup and getting communities connected. Social media optimization is connected to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites.

Businesses, both large and small, are increasingly experimenting with Web-services that integrate social media.