BENEFITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media optimization (SMO) is all about methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. They include adding RSS feeds and social news buttons, blogging, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. You can even have people logon to your site via their Facebook or 
Twitter identities.
Many website owners who practice search engine optimization have learned that building search engine friendly sites will naturally be rewarded with traffic. To get the same return with social media channels, your site will need to interact easily with them.
Typically, the difference between SEO and SMO lies in variable methods of getting traffic to your site. The traffic sources differ, too; with good SEO you expect traffic from the search engines whereas SMO is supposed to help you bring traffic from social media channels. What’s common with them both is the core principle: higher online presence gives your site higher SE rankings and increased web traffic.
Like search engine optimization, SMO offers on-page optimization techniques and focuses on a site or blog that already exists. In other words, you do not need to write additional content to make SMO for your site: you just optimize your pages for the social media phenomena to make them easily bookmarked, embedded on other sites, or accessed via third-party media.
The term “social media optimization” was first used and described by Rohit Bhargava, who developed 5 rules for conducting social media optimization:
- Increase your linkability
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy
- Reward inbound links
- Help your content travel
- Encourage the mashup
The list of rules was soon continued by the other bloggers although some authors confused social media optimization phenomenon with social media marketing. The other rules of SMO include:
- Encourage creation of user-generated content
- Allow users to evaluate, modify and organize content
- Let users connect on your site
To accomplish these tasks you can use the following tactics:
- Add share-me buttons connected to bookmarking sites, social news sites, social event sites and other social media channels
- Incorporate linking strategies that help users link to your site, link out of your site and cross link within your site
- Develop custom applications to help visitors of your site connect with each other, share ideas and communicate
- Allow users to rank, rate, and organize your content
- Integrate widgets from third-party social media sites using API’s
- Add RSS feeds to your site to make your content sharing easier
Adding share-me buttons
Publications that want to be known in the social media space have to relate to those networks by social share buttons. Before adding share-me buttons, you should identify which social networks are most relevant to your audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc).
You may want to install a plug-in that generates share-me buttons on your page, blog post or article. These buttons allow readers to select from a number of social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), social news sites (Digg, Reddit, Newswine) and bookmarking sites (Delicious, Furl, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Buddymarks), and share your content within a couple of clicks.
One of the most popular plug-ins of this kind is AddThis. AddThis is compatible with any website, most popular blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr), social networks (e.g. MySpace), most popular content management systems (Joomla! and Drupal), email newsletters, Microsoft Office Live and RSS Feeds.
It is advisable to add share-this buttons at the end of each article, news or blog post, rather than creating one share button for the entire newsletter or blog. That way, people can choose which stories are most interesting and worthy of sharing. Afterwards you can track how many times users clicked on a given share button to see the impact of shared articles on your inbound traffic.
Adding third-party widgets
Most popular social networks (Facebook, MySpace) offer widgets that you can use on your site to connect your users to the social networks, let them chat online, buy virtual gifts, play games, take quizzes, take part in polls and ratings, share photos, videos and other media without leaving your site.
Creating Mashup
Mashup is a Web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. In other words mashups are content aggregation technology which may also be successfully used for integrating business and data services to develop new integrated services.
Using these creative techniques you can greatly impact your visibility and show the value of your publications, facilitate sharing information and increase traffic from the featured social networks.
Remember that by generating more publicity in online conversations you have to be on multiple places where you don’t control the content but where it is valuable for you to be.
