SMO – Social Media Optimization

The internet is a dog-eat-dog world, where site traffic is everything. So how do you get all those web surfers to your little corner of the internet? Maybe it’s time to give Social Media Optimization a try. Social Media Optimization (or SMO) is a complicated process that can pay big dividends if you find and connect to your target demographic. But SMO shouldn’t be confused with SEO – Search Engine Optimization. SEO relies solely on internet users going to Google or Yahoo and searching the web for keywords. SMO is quite different. SMO relies on social networking sites to grab ahold of and promote your product, blog, video – whatever you may have chosen as a marketing tool for your website.

How does it work? First, you have to get noticed on a site that relies on users referring others to your product. It could be any number of sites: Digg, MySpace, YouTube. And when you catch the attention of the users on these sites, your marketing spreads like wildfire. It becomes viral. And that’s exactly what you want. SMO relies on some complicated software, which was originally developed by Netscape back in the 1990’s. Since then, it’s become the bread-and-butter of the internet. This software allows multiple websites and users to link to your website and view your content.

It connects you to all the people and sites you’ve been dying to reach. But that’s just the basics. The real challenge is developing a blog or a video or a game that users can’t get enough of. Something so fun or interesting or contagious that everyone wants to tell their friends about it. You want to see your content on the home page of MySpace or Digg, so all their millions of users, who log on everyday, see your website as a feature. You want those hits. Once you come up with your idea – funny, creative, challenging, whatever – get it out there. The rest is up to the social sites. And the reward is all yours.