What is Social Media Optimization?

What is Social Media Optimization?

In this article I would explain you briefly what is Social Media Optimization, its origin, what are the benefits of using good social media strategies for your business etc.

Social media Optimization (SMO) refers to the technique to attract more good quality traffic to your website through different social media channels and tools. It involves linking your website to social networking sites, from where you can attract more potential customers for your products or services in an easy and cost effective way.

We can classify Social media optimization into 2 main categories:

1)      Social Media feature Implementation : It involves incorporating social media features into the website content for example, adding RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos.

2)      Social media promotion: This category involves promoting the website content through several social media promotional activities such as blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles.

Social Media Optimization is related to search Engine Marketing (SEM) in some sense, but differs in many ways, primarily the focus here on driving traffic from social media sites or networks rather than from search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Today Social Media Optimization is considered as an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is not limited to marketing and brand building. Increasingly smart businesses are integrating social media participation as part of their knowledge management strategy (ie. product/service development, recruiting, employee engagement and turnover, brand building, customer satisfaction and relations, business development and more). Additionally, Social Media Optimization is often at times implemented to foster a community of the associated site, allowing for a healthy business to consumer relationship.

Origin of Social Media Optimization:

The term “social media optimization" was first used and described by Rohit Bhargava, a founding member of the ‘Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team’, and Adjunct Professor of Global Marketing at Georgetown University. In 2006, Rohit invented the concept of Social Media Optimization (SMO) on his blog, and recently updated his original 5 rules with the 5 new rules of SMO and is widely recognized across the marketing industry for this.

Bhargava's original five rules for conducting social media optimization are:

a)      Increase your link-ability.

b)      Make tagging and bookmarking easy.

c)       Reward inbound links.

d)      Help your content travel.

e)      Encourage the mash up.

f)       Get communities connected.

Four years after the initial post, Rohit Bhargava posted an updated set of five new rules.[4]

g)      Create shareable content

h)      Make sharing easy

i)        Reward engagement

j)        Proactively share content

k)      Encourage the mash up

You can find more about him and his activities on his blog named ‘Influential marketing blog’.

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About the Author

Firoz Muhammed is the author of this comprehensive article on Social Media Optimization, he is Social Media Enthusiast and writer on digital media topics. He is a blogger and expert in SEO, SMO and SEM techniques.  You can reach him on his mail id: firozct@gmail.com

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References

1. Social Media Optimization , Wikipedia
2. Top 14 Benefits of Social Media Marketing