The Social Media Marketer

5 Tips For Effective Social Media Optimization

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The world of advertising and marketing is constantly evolving.  In the 1990s, the dot-com craze hit.  Suddenly, companies started advertising and marketing heavily via the Internet instead of focusing simply on television and radio advertising.  Ad banners and pop-up windows began to appear on websites drawing attention to the sponsor's website.

After pop-up windows and ad banners came the idea of search engines. Sites like altavista.com and later Google.com came around.  This was great for customers as it gave them the opportunity to search for any company or industry they wanted. 

If you were looking for a new oak bed set you could type "new oak bed set" into the search engine and the search engine would generate a list of companies that sold new oak bed sets.  It became a science to get a company placed near the top of the search engine results.  This became called "search engine optimization" or SEO.
 
Today, marketing has taken yet another step forward.  No longer are we forcing companies to create a complex algorithm to determine the proper concentration of select keywords.  The next step in Internet advertising is social media optimization. 

What is Social Media Optimization?
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or blogs like WordPress to market a business.  The idea behind social media optimization is that people are spending more and more time on these social network sites looking for information and less and less time on search engines. 

Wikipedia, blogs and social media are becoming primary sources of information, rather than secondary sources.  As Brian Solis points out in his two-part article, the SMO trend is actually a socialized form of inbound marketing that helps make content discoverable when people search.

So, it's worth considering where you stand when it comes to social media optimization.  There are five key steps to an effective SMO plan.

Step One: Start Doing It
Like many business concepts, the hardest part of starting a social media optimization plan is doing it.  It can be simple to lay out a Twitter account name, create a Facebook page, and write a daily blog to market your company.  The most elaborate and successful business plan will never generate you a single dollar if your company does not act on the plan you have started to create.

Step Two:  Make A Daily Commitment To It
Even if you are only spending an hour each day on your social media optimization, it is critical that it is developed daily.  The best social media content will not be able to make your business effective if it looks unfinished, or if the connections are not made.  One of the hardest things to do in the realm of cyberspace is gain notoriety.  Demian Farnworth wrote an article describing the ten best ways to prevent your social media optimization plan from disappearing in the wide realm of the Internet.

Step Three:  It Must Be Quality
If you are producing volumes upon volumes of social media interaction to market and advertise your company, but the quality of the content is not up to par, then you can write an entire encyclopedia about how wonderful your goods and services are and no one will ever pursue them.

If you were to be honest, you might find that you are not the world's best writer.  Your content is fair and serviceable but to really attract clients the content should be cutting edge.  Silly grammar mistakes or boring content will never attract customers to your company or product.

Step Four:  Produce Results
As your company receives orders for the product or service, you will have an opportunity to produce quality results for your customers.  Why is this important?  This leads to one of the most critical aspects of social media optimization: advocates.  According to a recent article written by Lee Odden nearly 1 in 6 minutes of online time is spent on a social media site.

After your customers use your product or service, they are likely to tell others about it when their friends and followers are seeking a similar product and service.

Step Five:  Repeat
Diligence is its own reward.  Just because your business has experienced a few great months and the reactions to your social media plan have been overwhelming, this is not a license to stop doing it.  

Social media optimization is an extremely effective means of marketing your company, but it is critical that you keep at it.  Millions of users log on to Twitter and Facebook every day, and an effective SMO campaign can bring many potential clients to your business.