Making Social Media Optimization Work for You
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Social media optimization is the art of using social web sites to promote your business or organization. If you do it right, you can attract thousands of visitors to your web site, to say nothing of the number of links. This article will explain SMO and offer some tips.
Social media optimization, sometimes called “social media marketing,” was first discussed online on August 10, 2006, by Rohit Bhargava, vice president of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations. He posited five rules of social media optimization; his original blog post has expanded to encompass 17 rules, which I’ve written about previously.
It was in 2007 however, that social media optimization really began to hit its stride. In the past year I’ve seen at least as many articles about SMO as I have about more traditional SEO. Additionally, many SEO articles that describe the variety of things you can do to promote your web site will include a section that covers social media optimization. They may not use that name, or even any particular name, but what they describe is taking advantage of social media sites to generate buzz, visits, links and hopefully conversions.
In short, SMO is becoming a mainstream part of SEO. That became pretty clear when The Wall Street Journal ran an article in February 2007 about the “hidden influencers” that post links to web sites such as Digg that become popular and generate traffic for those sites. These people aren’t in it for the money – but even then, the article noted that some were trying to cash in on the trend with services that offered to generate traffic for web sites by paying people to “vote up” posts.
You shouldn’t resort to those kinds of practices. They’re generally frowned on – or worse – in online social communities. But you do need to know what you’re dealing with. Start by getting the target audience for your offering firmly in mind; if you’re on the top of your game, you should know who these people are anyway. Knowing who your audience is will help give you some idea of where to go to find them.
Next: Differences in Social Sites >>
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