SMO/SMM: Social Media Optimization/Social Media Marketing
Social media optimization is the process of enhancing and positioning a website so that its content can grow recognition through social mediums and internet communities like Digg, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Wikipedia, blogs, forums, and other user-generated content sites as well as improve its naturally occurring organic search rankings. Social media marketing involves playing a more active role in social media communities by distributing content through the social web via viral marketing promotion and interesting content. Social media marketing then leverages the off-site handling of the content as well as on-site promotional aspects such as social bookmarking to enhance SEO efforts and provide waves of interested traffic to your site.
The concept of SMO is to use viral aspects of the internet such as user generated content and rich media such as video and imagery to help spread the word about a site. This usually bodes well for those users that use the internet in such a way as to create natural editorial links, pick up RSS feeds, and become long time visitors of the websites. With this in mind, SMM will drive company service awareness to multiple communities which will later translate to a higher amount of sales. In fact, some organic search engine algorithms are designed to favor related community site interlinking over other inbound links.
SMM will use several methods of distributing content through the social “Web 2.0” scope. Using social bookmarking, video, blogging, and wiki content among others, viral and social marketing encompasses a variety of marketing techniques such as word-of-mouth deliverance and internet network promotions. SMM relies heavily on the social bookmarking system which allows users to vote for web pages or sites that they found interesting and helping expose that content via the powerful pages of the social bookmarking sites themselves, thus further advertising those sites to more potential visitors and customers.
