Social media is defined by Wikipedia as "the online tools and platforms which people use to share beliefs, insights, experiences, as well as perspectives with one another. Social media can take numerous dissimilar forms, among other things text, images, audio, and video. Known social mediums consist of blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs."
With over 500 billion users on Facebook alone social media like Digg, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has taken the 'online life' by storm. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is taking the world by storm. Any website may use this tool to divert more traffic towards it and the developing traffic on any site means the future of that company, idea or website.
There are several techniques and tools that must be employed on SM sites to make certain that the site is noticeable on the internet. There are two categories of SMO methods:
A. SM features can be added to the content itself such as RSS feeds, sharing buttons, user rating, polling tools, social news and incorporating images and videos
B. Promotional activities such as blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles can lead to optimization too.
The concept behind SMO in Rahul Bhargava's words is to "implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more greatly noticeable in social media searches on custom search engines, and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs."
This can be brought about by enhance linkability of your site, by making tagging and bookmarking easy, rewarding inbound links, by helping your content travel and encouraging mashup. All this includes new marketing techniques such as linkbaiting, usability design, buzz marketing or community building.
A site owner ought to be attentive of which kind of congregation it should target because this knowledge helps in marketing his product. The owner should join in the conversation about his product and company on the SM because by conversing with the community you can help generate spotlight and stretch your buzz. Participating helps your message spread further. If you continue with these efforts, it will result in a snowball effect.
A vital part lies in extending your content. No matter how general your product your content must be dynamic and must be attractive so the users are pulled into reading it.
SM may help distribute messages via blog posts and blog search engines through which one can carve a niche for his site, which is something like word-of-mouth marketing. SMO is pull marketing; it is not "push your message onto someone."
SMO has great potentiality but still it cannot substitute SEO importance since Yahoo and Google are the foremost traffic diverters but SMO does hold prime significance when it comes to the utilization of new techniques to enhance your online distinction.
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