July 30th, 2009 | Written by: april
Having a corporate website is great, but futile if no one stays long enough to glean any value. Optimizing your website for social media has the capacity to increase exposure and drive more traffic to your business. In fact, social media optimization is one of the most powerful tools in leveraging your existing client base to promote your company and reach a much larger audience. Here is what you need to know about utilizing social media optimization for your business:
Social media optimization (SMO) is the practice of making your website appealing and easy for people to share or link to. Rohit Bhargava (Ogilvy Public Relations) sums up social media optimization:
“The concept behind SMO is simple: 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.”
You may have invested in an SEO company to build your online exposure in search engines. However, SEO is half the journey. What happens when your site is hit with traffic? Will your visitors stay? Come back? Tell their friends about you? This is where social media optimization comes into play.
The objective behind SMO is to encourage viral marketing – that is, creating content of value which is likely to be spread across the internet. Favorable content is the single most important tool behind this objective. If your site sucks, you’re sheer out of luck. With that said, consider providing value for your visitors that exceeds the mere provision of your product or service – whether it be resources, exclusive industry information, news or engaging media, such as videos, images or slide presentations.
Let’s say you have a smashing good website that boasts of great content – the challenge of SMO then lies in making your website easy for visitors to share. Social media optimization tools that make sharing your site accessible for visitors include adding RSS feeds to your page, providing easy bookmarking and share buttons in the footer of your articles, or links to your content that are easy for visitors to copy and paste. Providing the tools for your visitors is an essential part of optimizing your site for social media.
Increasingly savvy companies are integrating social media optimization as part of their reputation management, online exposure and internet marketing strategies. Social media optimization utilizes a powerful channel that not only engages and influences your existing client base, but has the capacity to amplify your business profile to a powerful audience – reaching a scalable customer base on a global level.
In your experience, what social media platforms do you find are best in leveraging your client base?
Tags: smo, social media, social media optimization
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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