Social Media Magazine

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a concept that company marketing executives are now taking seriously. The viral marketing capabilities of social networks, platforms, and social sharing can have a dramatic effect on the overall content and search optimization process.

Social Media Optimization was a prevalent concept to search engine optimization (SEO) experts during the rise of social networking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr and YouTube, as well as many syndication and RSS driven tools like Netvibes. Many personal bookmarking tools gave individuals the ability to publish their favorites and thus perpetuate the sharing of bookmarked content.

As with many new web technologies and concepts the bloggers "got it." Syndication and sharing had always been a key element of how blog publishers gained attention and social promotion of their content. Social media platforms were now the perfect catalyst for articles the were ripe for social media promotion.

Social Media Optimization became mainstream when content publishers began to understand the value of this viral marketing and started "optimizing" their articles for social media sharing. Major publishers and content creators began adding social media tools to their published news articles setting the pace for all other traditional publishers. Again, taking a lead from the content management optimization of popular blogging systems we started seeing comments, tagging, and social bookmarking tools as key social tools on all new stories.

We also see the rise of SMO as a tool for marketing. Social media marketers learned that while there was a tremendous potential for viral marketing (mentos and diet coke) via social media channels they also could not control all aspects of virally promoted messages or content. Social media marketing and formal social media optimization firms developed techniques defined basic guidelines for allowing citizen media to promote content and messages.

Social media optimization can relate to both individual content items, such as a stories "SMO content value," or to an entire website and the overall structure as it may invite social media sharing behavior.

Individual social media optimized stories are written to highlight some interesting core fact, premise, hypothesis, or controversy and often elicit feedback or comments from readers. Social media consultants help commercial news and independent news and writers to follow a complete social media workflow process to insure their new stories are positioned for social media promotion. Video and other socially shared content can also be promoted as other publishers utilize this content in their own blog posts and articles.