Social Media Optimisation (SMO) in Practice - Web 2.0 for growing your business

16 October 2007 - By Sean Fishlock

I thought I'd enlighten you on a new buzzword in the Internet space - Social Media Optimisation or SMO.

SMO draws upon the range of social networking websites and other Web 2.0 applications.  Some people, myself included, feel that it emerging importance in comparison to traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or the practice of trying to lift your site in Google rankings, and they are both actually very much linked.   In fact, Internet search engines like Google may one day move towards using content popularity as a measure of importance in search results.

In my personal opinion, SEO is getting extremely competitive and hard.  Search engine marketing is a bit hit and miss.  When it becomes hard, you start to resort to pay-per-click, and these days, even thats where you have to start reaching deep into your pockets just to get noticed.  Whereas I believe SMO offers a lot more opportunity.  Basically SEO and even pay per click only really offer you a linear growth in traffic to your site, whereas SMO can have a real "Snowball effect", offering the potential to grow your traffic exponentially.

So, I have taken the tips of Rohit Bhargava, who is credited as inventing the term, and here are some tips as to the sort of ways you can use his rules and the rules of many others in practice. 

You'll notice on this blog, that there are links to the popular social networking sites.  If you like my articles, you can submit them to Digg and others can judge them.  If you think they are newsworthy, you can submit them to Newsvine.  If you want to access it again later, you can bookmark it with online services such as de.licio.us.

But that is just the start of it ...

One of the first things I did once I got on to de.licio.us is sent a memo to all my staff requesting them to bookmark and tag our website on the service.  My feeling is the more links to it out there, the merrier, and each person has a different view on what tags describe our site and its content.

I like to drop a line on the occasional blog out there and always use my real name.  This helps me participate in the overall conversation.  We use video sites like YouTube to help get the message out there, and people comment and share these videos.  People tend to watch the videos that are popular and what's more is that Google now shows the videos in its search results, which stimulates more views. 

We also have a policy which encourages all staff to add our company RSS feed to their Facebook accounts.  This adds a small amount of exposure to the very blog you're reading.  I also have e-Magination news on my personal blog.  In fact anyone else (known as the "mashup") can share my content also using RSS, and we have broken it into separate feeds to allow people to subscribe only to the sorts of info that interests them.  Sure, it is mostly amongst our staff and their friends, at the moment but word-of-mouth is one of our most important networking tools.  Many of our customers come from people who know us.  The leads are highly qualified and are more likely to convert to sales than casual Internet browsers.

I also ensure that every client's website we build has a place in my social bookmark accounts.  For a start, this gives them instant link popularity and rather than not show up at all in a delicious search, they at least have a listing - albeit low on the list.

While this might seem "forced", as a company, we are after all, a social entity.  We exist to share ideas in the pursuit of a common goal.  And through strategies like these our traffic has increased.  Like SEO, all these little things add up and importantly, all Social Media Optimisation feeds into Search Engine Optimisation.  Although, with either SEO or SMO, it is important to realise that more referrals does not guarantee more sales.  Our experience though is that it does help, and we can share the success with people just like you.

Comments

By Aeon on 21 December 2008 at 01:04 AM

Great article you nail it on the head. Social Media in my opinion is the next step to the web and surely will be around for time to come.

By chronis on 08 December 2008 at 09:14 PM

actually i am new to social media optimization but i wanted learn more about smo thank you for giving good and relevant inforamtion about social media optimization.

By Afzal Khan on 21 April 2008 at 03:46 PM

Hi Sean,

Nice to read your views on SMO, however to my thinking SMO is surely an next generation approach changing the shift of people to make websites more interactive. As an user it's good for me where I get lots of option to bookmark & share content thru other people.

To my knowledge there are few websites which are really creating a SMO buzz...like

Hubspot.com
Squidoo.com
Stumbleupon.com

By del.ico.us on 27 February 2008 at 12:36 PM

I've been reading up on Social Media Marketing and it's turning into an industry of its own. Something I thought was worth mentioning is that del.ico.us is now blocking bots from search engines other than Yahoo (who own the network). In other words, they are completely breaking off from the search engine side of things.

There are a couple of good sites that talk about all the different marketing methods you can try in social media marketing. Here is a list of all of the different social media sites and how they can be used for marketing and advertising -

http://www.demonzmedia.com/DemonzBlog/?p=7

And here is a service that generates social bookmark tags -

http://www.egmstrategy.com/ice/tag-generator.cfm


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