When you begin using social networks and other sites to promote your business, you will need to start looking at SMO ? social media optimization. SEO, or search engine optimization, focuses on drawing attention from the search engines and getting to the top of the rankings. SMO sounds similar and indeed is somewhat similar but you will be focusing on drawing attention from the other members on the social media websites and getting popular among the largest number of these users possible. There are many things that you can do in your social media optimization campaign but here are three involving your website that are particularly crucial to your success.
The first thing to do when planning a social media optimization strategy for your website is to make your site interesting and “sticky”. People don’t share boring websites on the social media sites. They share sites that either make them laugh, show them something very useful or otherwise engage them. Creating a “sticky” website just means that your visitor will stick around for longer and come back more often. Ways of doing that include adding fresh content on a regular basis, conducting polls or surveys and anything that adds an element of interactivity with the audience. Those are the things that people want to link to so give them what they want and you’ll be rewarded.
The next thing to do on your website is to make it easy for people to share your content with their favorite social media sites. Most of the media sites offer buttons you can use like “Tweet This” so that readers can just hit that button and login to Twitter and automatically post your content. There are a number of applications, both free and paid, that can be added to your website to make this even easier. Try to give your visitors as wide a choice as possible, even if you don’t use all the social sites yourself.
The last tip that we’ll cover for maximum social media optimization on your website itself is to make it easy for your audience to connect directly with you at the sites you are trying to build a presence on. Even though we said to give them a wide choice for sharing, you are not going to be focusing on dozens of social networking sites. There just isn’t time in the day to be an active participant in too many. However, the ones that you are active in, add a widget or button that allows them to become one of your “friends” or “followers” – whatever your chosen site calls your network.
