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Strategies for Social Media Optimization
August 2, 2007

On Tuesday, we provided some background to the emerging issue of social media optimization (SMO). What are some SMO strategies marketers can use to boost inbound traffic?

The aforementioned Rohit Bhargava identified five basic rules, but naturally others have tacked on many others. As have we...

• Link Link Link. First, as Bhargava says, increase linkability. That is, provide compelling content, and by "compelling" all we really mean is "fresh" content. As we mentioned previously, a blog is a good way to provide frequently updated content in a format that encourages user participation and interaction with the content (that is, via comments). Other ideas include daily news updates, stock quotes, or other dynamic content that keeps people coming back and stimulates them to add a link on their own blog or site.
• Add Buttons and Widgets. You can also increase linkability by adding buttons so-called widgets to your own site or blog posts. Buttons such as "digg this" or "add to del.icio.us" will upload a bookmark to your site to social bookmarking sites. Widgets are small lines of code you can provide to site visitors that they can simply copy and paste into their own sites or blogs. These simple but crucial strategies can help get the word out. Adding RSS feeds of your content can also make it easy for others to automatically retrieve your content. 
• Reward External Links. At the same time, practice a little quid pro quo. That is, don't expect others to link to your site unless you also link to others' sites. A prominently placed roster of "recently linked to" sites or a regular "blogroll" (a list of favorite external blogs) can also help provide positive reinforcement to those who add external links to your site.
• Support the Community. Social networking is all about participating in an online community. As a result, marketing needs to be a lot more subtle than is typically the case. Thus, external links should be appropriately tagged and categorized, with comments that provide some value to the reader/linker. Anything that screams "We're marketing to you!" instead of contributing something to the online community will simply be ignored at best or flamed at worst.
• Join the Community. Depending on your resources, someone inhouse should be tasked with setting up accounts on social networking and bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, or MySpace (etc.) and adding links back to your own site. At the same time, reading and commenting on other related blogs and forums (and, again, in a way that contributes positively to the community) also helps gain visibility and encourages inbound traffic.

These and other steps can help ensure that your site is not only visible, but "respected." These strategies are not for everyone, but case studies abound in the trade media of success stories involving marketing and social networking. Whether this is the wave of the future or the fad du jour is anyone’s guess, but, for now, it's where the action is, and it behooves the savvy marketer to get the most out of it.

Posted by Richard Romano on August 2, 2007 | Comments (0)