social media optimization - SMO

Abbreviated as SMO, social media optimization is the process of increasing the awareness of a product, brand or event by using a number of social media outlets and communities to generate viral publicity.
Social media optimization includes using RSS feeds, social news and bookmarking sites, as well as social media sites and video and blogging sites. SMO is similar to SEO (search engine optimization) in that the goal is to drive traffic to your Web site.

Why Social Media Optimization Matters

Before we get to the practical, let’s start with the “Why,” as in “Why you should care about SMO?” As you can see from the chart below, social networks are driving an increasing amount of traffic to an increasing number of websites. Sites like Comedy Central, Forever 21 and Etsy are seeing more traffic from social networks than they see from Google. How social referral traffic is performing for you most likely depends on two factors:
1. How interesting your content is; and
2. How easily shareable you have made that content across a variety of networks
n other words, SMO can lead to increased traffic to your site, as friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you’re likely reaching a well-targeted audience.  Further, it also leads to improved search engine optimization, as major search engines count links as if they were votes for your site. SMO isn’t just about building a bigger social media presence for your brand. Whether or not your organization has a strong social network presence, the social networks of others can be leveraged to great effect

Widgets and Badges

Before the sudden ubiquity of Facebook’s Social Graph, widgets were the go-to tool that allowed others to “grab” your content and share it on their blogs, Facebook profiles, MySpace accounts, and dozens of other smaller social sites or programs like iGoogle.
The NBA is a good example of an organization that has used widgets to great effect, allowing passionate fans to spread branded content across their social networks without ever landing on NBA.com to get it. At my company, we had one client who produces a lot of video tell us their video views doubled when they stopped forcing people to come to their site to see them.
Below is an example of what a simple widget might look like before and after a user activates it to share content.

Content Sharing

While most experienced social media marketers now understand the value of social sharing, there are some key points to be made here.
First, offer options. According to social sharing plugin AddThis, Facebook is far and away the number one place where people share content through their widget, taking 38.52% of the pie. But that means that over 61% of shares are being made elsewhere. Having said that, I’m not a huge fan of those “Share This” and “Add This” buttons, unless they are supplemented in a way that features only a few major services.
In fact, AddThis’ own data shows that its toolbox (which displays only a few major networks, instead of an expandable box of hundreds) performs 40% better than its regular widget. AddThis has even added functionality to that toolbox that shows different buttons for each user based on what sites they personally share to the most — even more targeting.