Social media Optimization Secrets

Today, many new areas of opportunity and pathways of consumer traffic are becoming the topic of interest of marketing people everywhere. It’s called social marketing and it appears to be here to stay. These new social marketing areas put the advertising directly in the paths of people where they are in the normal course of daily events.

A huge number of sites exist that are centered around things like podcasting, RSS feeds, public and private blogs, user forums, wiki’s, user review websites, and various social networking websites like MySpace, Friendster, Face Book and Digg. The process connects active consumers on these sites with mutual interests with what they are seeking online. The benefits of this type of marketing include: increased website traffic, increased brand awareness, viral marketing.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

SMM is primarily driven by off-site activities that are initiated on social media web sites, such as Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flicker and others, to spread a message or content (video, text a-rticle, and audio) by itself from-to-friend.

Increasing inbound links to get more traffic to achieve top web site rankings in the organic sea-rch engines or improving brand-awareness and consumer associations, a social media marketi-ng campaign is more effective when you have a compelling message or unique content and prominent profile in the social media.

Compelling text-based content that gets bookmarked at Del.icio.us or Furl or by making the ho-me page at Digg to the creation of a video that spreads virally by placing it on YouTube and o-ther video sharing and social networking web sites.

Social Media Marketing happens online and requires a lot of experimentation and testing. the risk of failure is higher than for “traditional” online marketing and advertising, but the rewards can be high for relatively low cost.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social media optimization is a more narrowly defined activity then social media marketing. Soc-ial media optimization is often limited to making a web site or blog more adaptable to social media.

The idea behind social media optimization is that by adding compelling, dynamic and fresh con-tent on a regular basis, e.g. through Tip Sheets, How To listings, white papers, a podcast or blo-g, a web site gets more easily and frequently linked to and achieves top ranking and visibility in the general and specialty search engine such as Technorati, Blog Pulse and podcast directories. Other examples of SMO are the implementation of links to social media web sites to make tagging, sharing bookmarks (Del.icio.us), and voting for content (Digg, Netscape, and Stumble upon) by visitors easier.

Benefits of this service include a better understanding of product issues, awareness of con-sumer opinions and feedback from various sources, and other posted content found that talk a-bout your company, products or services, employees, or other company information.