Developing a Social Media Optimization Marketing Strategy
While in a client meeting yesterday it struck me that the social media options available to a business can be so overwhelming that companies can decide not to do anything simply because they don’t know where to begin. Social Media Optimization I believe should be part of your overall online strategy. SMO does not replace your PPC campaign or your search engine optimization efforts. Instead it works in conjunction with those programs. So assuming that you have a search engine strategy in place already, how would a company go about employing a social media optimization strategy? Looking back at Rohit’s original social media optimization concepts, Rohit explained that the goal of SMO is to:
“implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”
Let’s focus on the first part of that sentence, “optimize a site that is more easily linked to”. In short, your first step in developing a social media optimization strategy is to develop content on your web site that people would want to link to. Link worthy content can take many different forms. Some examples could be:
- Build an information resource center on your site that covers the topics important to your industry and customers.
- See what people in your industry are interested in and write about it. Not sure where to start? Check out Del.ico.us and see what people are bookmarking and reading in your space. http://del.icio.us/popular/
Once you have the content on your web site, provide users with different options to link to the information or email the page to a friend. One of the reasons behind the success of YouTube was that YouTube provided users with code so that they could link directly to a video from their web site. They also provided several other options so that users could share the content with their friends. This made the content much more “viral” and this word of mouth advertising helped propel YouTube to stardom in under 18 months. You might wonder how this social media optimization strategy is different than a search engine optimization strategy. In short, it isn’t. That is because in this stage we are looking for ways to drive links and traffic to your main web site, which is typically a core component of an SEO strategy. The only slight difference is that we are not focused on search engine visibility, but instead on developing content that others will want to link to. As we develop the rest of the SMO marketing plan, we will move the focus away from driving traffic to your web site from search engines and instead begin to look at where people are congregating online and how you can be more visible on those places.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Sep 14th, 2006
September 15th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
[...] In a previous post I wrote about how to implement a social media optimization (SMO) marketing strategy. In phase one you added some terrific content to your web site, and traffic and links have increased. So now you are ready for phase two: venturing into the world of social media optimization. [...]
October 4th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
neat post - the implication is that SMO makes SEO the means, not the end
cheers
jorge