Social Media Optimisation (SMO) What is it?

A broad definition of SMO would be that it is a form of internet marketing which harnesses the power of the increasingly popular user driven content bookmarking sites such as digg.com and wists.com for sources of both inbound links and traffic. This form of marketing strategy can best be described as ‘viral’ in as much as it creates the necessary excitement in the online community about a particular website.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. The content of the site is added to by the users and not the site owners.

A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Miniclip (game sharing). These sites typically user technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, and wikis to allow users to interact.

Social bookmarking sites operate as a way of storing internet bookmarks online, much the same way as the ‘Favourites’ function on your web browser works on your computer. The only difference is that these bookmarks are made public and freely available to other internet users to view. A user can post favourite articles, images, web sites or news stories with the addition on many sites that they can be rated or commented on by other users and be given a ranking which, if the content is good, keeps it popular and ensures a steady stream of traffic to your website.

Social Media Optimisation is an excellent way to achieve and stimulate the ‘buzz’ required to increase interest and traffic to your site and is an good way to get your site noticed. Bear in mind however that lots of traffic to your site may not necessarily convert to sales, but, when SMO is combined with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), results will surely follow.

Be advised that simply spamming or posting inferior content on a social bookmarking site will not improve the traffic and rankings for your site. The online population will not tolerate useless information and will quickly vote down your content rendering it useless.