Social Media Optimization

Social Media is now popular with everyone. The use of Social Media Optimization is done by attracting links and visitors to your website content by promoting it with social media. SMO is part of social media marketing and is critical to today’s business success.

With Social Media Optimization, your content can easily be shared by tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands of hungry potential customers. A social media platform sends this information completely virtually, from one interested person passing along a product or discount coupon to another. It’s that simple!

The beauty of social media is that it is 100 percent user-added content. A social media site is filled with content only from its users. When your website is optimized with social media strategies, you are prepared to promote yourself using these fast, fun and effective tools. You’re ready to connect with the millions who rely on social media to find new products, services and great deals every day.

For some, the benefit of using social media is the exposure and inbound links. The goal is to attract those social media visitors and convert them from “visitors” into new customers. Quite often, these are customers who are more than happy to mention your great product or service using these very same social media tools, creating a viral effect that is natural and quite effective.

Creating top-quality content with your best keywords will easily appeal to your customers and is an ideal use for social media tools. Invite social media visitors to visit your company’s blog or fresh pages of your website. This will increase your company’s reputation, improve your inbound links and help attract new customers.

Two SMO ideas for you

Social media features added to your website:
These include RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools and incorporating third-party community functionality, such as video or images.

Promotional activities on social media sites:
It’s not just about promoting your content. This includes blogging, commenting on related blogs, joining in on related discussion groups and posting status updates to your social networking profiles.

The main social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Wordpress and LinkedIn; but there are quite a few others including Reddit, Spurl, Blinklist, Yahoo Answers, Ning, and 43 Things, to name a few. Remember, even if you haven’t heard of or don’t use a social networking site, that doesn’t mean that your customers don’t. You also want to make sure that your brand names, trademarks and company name are registered on all social media sites worldwide.

Want success? Be Linkable!

Today’s websites must use web 2.0 social media and being linkable is a priority. Lots of sites are just “static.” This means they aren’t updated frequently and are just used as a storefront. If you want to be optimized for social media, the linkability of your site’s content needs to be improved. Adding a blog is an excellent strategy, but there are other things you can do – so don’t stop there. Consider creating videos, white papers, newsletters, and link baits. The type of company you have will often decide what type of linkable content appeals to you the most.

Permitting tags is one of the fastest ways to have accessible content on your site. Add “Digg This,” and “Add to del.licio.us” or other tags for your content including an RSS feed. Tagging and bookmarking links encourage readers to submit the content for you. This also gives your site a strong community feeling.

Here are some linkable content steps you can take…even if you aren’t sure what content to add:

• A video showing how a new product works
• A video showing how a new service is provided
• A series of How To articles related to your topic. (i.e. – a hair salon could write How To articles about hair and beauty tips)
• White papers in your business field/niche
• A company blog where employees can submit blog entries
• A monthly newsletter

As you can see, the topics can start to flow once you begin to think about the possibilities. Where once you thought, “I couldn’t do a video” now you may realize that a video about a new product or service is very easy to produce and appealing to site visitors.

Interact with social media sites always offering content that is of value. The worst thing you can do is to spam a social media site. How do you know it is spam? When what you are doing is just self-promotion and not interactive. Think about what you are offering and consider yourself in the customer’s shoes, “Would I want to receive this? Is it useful or valuable?” If you hesitate that’s a sign to search for something else to send out.

MarkTheGlobe can work with you to create a successful social media strategy for your business, including social media marketing and reputation management.