Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social media optimization is one of the newer forms of Internet marketing that takes advantage of the social sources of traffic. In the newer Web 2.0 phase of the Internet it is becoming more and more popular for users to socialize and communicate with each other via web sites. This trend ultimately develops traffic origins from places other than just search engines. Authoritative social hubs get created such Myspace, YouTube and Digg to name a few. With these new sources of traffic there becomes many new ways to tap in and creatively bring a portion of those users to the desired locations.

Popular SMO strategies and techniques

1. Blogs / RSS Feeds

   Having a blog can be a great way to share fresh and new content with the visitors of a web site. It also allows for a less formal type of discussion where users can actually comment and interact with the authors of the company / web site. This takes the web site to a much more personal level and develops trust among users.

2. Link Bait

   Link bait ties into SEO a little bit as it is the process of aquiring high quality links by offering something valuable, funny, useful or pretty much anything that somebody wants to tell somebody else about. By creating linkable content the web site is benefiting in two ways:

   1. The web site is gaining backlinks which is one of the most important factors to ranking well and developing trust on the search engines
   2. The web site is generating immediate traffic from these link sources without needing a search engine query at all.

3. Social Bookmarking / Tagging

   Social bookmarking ties in with blogging a little bit as it is the process of getting content published and bookmarked in online tools such as Technorati and Del.icio.us. By getting a web site bookmarked and mentioned on a number of these social web sites it can create a sudden burst of traffic.

SMO is more or less creative and "buzz" marketing. It revolves heavily around much more risky and creative Internet marketing and can pay of greatly if executed well. The main problem with SMO is that it is more or less hit or miss. There hasn't yet been established a steady model or set of rules to follow as there has been with search engines. There is also some debate as to how well the traffic converts compared to search engines as well.

Overall SMO is a very new and exiting avenue that appears to have a bright future.