5 GOLDEN RULES OF SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION (SMO)

We are familiar with SEO now, but there is one more offering we can get into practice is Social Media Optimization (SMO). The SMO is a subset of SEO itself but is applied only to the social media platforms. The concept of SMO is simple and straight, it is a process of implementing changes to optimize a website or a post so that it is highly visible in social media searches or on custom search engines, more easily linked to and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, vlogs and podcasts.

Here are 5 rules you can use to help and guide your thinking with conducting an SMO for any website.

1.    Create shareable content – Few years ago, the focus was on likability because the main currency that could drive up your traffic was how many people were getting linked to your content. Today content can be liked, shared or tweeted and it is about more than links – it is about creating content that is likeable and shareable. The more high quality your content is, the more people will want to share it with their entire social networks whether they like it, link it, dig it or share it.

2.    Make sharing easy – Coming from the preceding point, bookmarking and tagging only scratch the surface of the many ways that people can share content with others. They can embed a video, post a short link to their profile, send out a tweet or create a hashtag for a conversation. Nowadays, It doesn’t make any sense in limiting the ways of sharing to just tagging or bookmarking the posts. The main agenda of this rule, however, was the point about making it easy. When you have shareable content, people should be able to share it with minimal or no effort. Placing a share button with a social platform logo can be a good attempt.

3.    Reward engagement – Previously, the main part that most marketers were focused on were inbound links. It was a time when platforms like Technorati were the standard by which you measured the performance of your content and many bloggers focused more on their number of inbound links than their readership or traffic numbers. Today the real currency is about conversation or engagements with the readers. While there are a million definitions for “engagement” depicting comments and discussion and posting or sharing content – this is the format that matters most in the social web and the one that we should all focus on rewarding whenever it happens.

4.    Dedicatedly share content – In past, it was in trend to publish your content in other formats such as PDFs or videos and submitting them to other sites. But, today, it is all about aggressively sharing your content in a different way. This includes everything from creating documents to share on Scribd , slides to post on Slideshare or using RSS feeds to associate it, as well as tweeting about your content or offering embeded versions of it,. Dedicatedly sharing even comprises of creating profiles on video sharing sites and posting your content to various social networking platforms.

5.    Boost the mashup: The concept of the “mashup” is that in which people feed and remix your ideas by adding up their own ideas and voice. The ‘new updated content’ will be around to stay, whether the keywords continue to be searched or not. Allowing people to take an ownership over their views on social content you publish will continue to be a key way that you can optimize your content for the social web.