Social Media Optimisation (SMO)

Social Media appeared on the Internet in 2006 and has since grown to offer new online technologies to help people share their opinions and experiences with each other in the form of text, links, images, audio and video. It allows businesses to reach their target audience via a whole new channel. Social Media is worldwide and user-driven, which is both good news and bad news for companies as the user community can have enormous power over the reputation of a brand or a company.

There are many different optimisation techniques available to the Webmaster including Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Conversion rate Optimisation (CRO). Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is the most recent and looks at the social aspects of your website helping your business to interact better with your website visitors and customers. The Internet is continually changing and new technologies appear all the time.

SMO is about the strategies used to set up Social Media components on your website that allow your customers to interact and participate with you during their online experience. The whole point is to make your site more accessible to your visitors by allowing them to interact with your content via the following means.

RSS Feeds
Providing RSS Feeds for your services, products, blogs, etc allows users to know instantly what has changed on your website through the use of a Feed Reader. RSS Feeds help to get your content distributed across the web and is a simple way to tap into the Web 2.0 technology.

Create a Blog
A blog is simply a means of displaying content, one article after another on your website. This allows visitors to easily interact with your business and your services. A blog is easy to set up and is a great way to record daily events on your website.

Tagging and Bookmarking
The social web is all about sharing information and tagging your web pages allows people to easily bookmark your content by adding your web pages to their list of favourites on Explorer or one of the many social websites such as Digg, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube.

Discussion Forum
Forums allow your visitors to discuss and comment on your services and products. This can be of great benefit to companies, as monitoring the Forum will give you the chance to understand your customers and put you in a position to talk to your customers directly and in real time.

Online Videos and Images
Creating videos in the form of Podcasts can be a great way to communicate with your customers and bring life into website. Share your videos and pictures with popular social network sites for optimisation benefits such as YouTube.

Steve Greenwood has been designing and optimising websites along the Costa del Sol in Spain for more than 3 years. Please visit Social Media Optimisation (SMO) for further Internet Marketing Solutions including SEO, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and Online Reputation Management (ORM).