Drive Traffic to Your Website Through Social Media Optimization

As social media increasingly becomes entrenched in the daily fabric of our lives, more and more organizations find that using social media outlets to reach a wider audience in the hopes of keeping current customers engaged, and finding new customers, is critical to their business. Social Media Optimization allows organizations to make use of social networking and other online communities to increase publicity and get people to become more aware of a particular product, brand or upcoming event. What does Social Media Optimization, or SMO for short, allow companies to do? The basic goal is to optimize a website in such a way that it is more easily linked to the various social media outlets such as social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace) micro-blogging sites (Twitter, Tumblr, Google Buzz), social bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious), blogs, vlogs, wikis and multimedia sharing websites (YouTube, Flickr, Pinterest). This in turn should lead to an increase in the frequency with which a website is mentioned in these various outlets finally leading to increased visibility. There are several ways in which a business can go about creating successful social media optimization strategy –

• Identifying a target audience is the first critical step when creating content especially geared towards consumption through social networking communities. If content is not reaching the users that a business is looking to reach, then no amount of strategizing will get any results.
• Website content should be relevant, current and easily shareable. In order to effectively use social networking sites as a way to increase visibility, it is important that the message a business wants to send out is clear and allows the audience to pass it forward easily. For example, nowadays users could Tweet your website content, Digg it or Like it.
• Businesses should make a proactive outreach effort to reach the community and spread awareness of their website. Social networking outlets are successful based on the principle of give-and-take. Creating a business blog, which interacts with other bloggers in addition to posting good content, is a great example of proactive participation in the vast world of social media.
• Paying attention to timing is critical in an environment where over 340 millio Twitter updates are being made per day. Getting the right message to the right users at the right time becomes mission-critical. There are several organizations that focus solely on helping businesses time their messages to their audience. It may be worthwhile to invest in such an initiative.
• Using positive reinforcement principles to keep loyal followers around is another great strategy for maintaining engagement levels and increasing reach as loyal users push content further in their social media interactions. Rewarding people who create buzz in the online community can be as simple as online reciprocity (increasing visibility their content) or giving them free products.

Conclusion Social media has fundamentally changed the way that we interact with each other. So for organizations that want to stay top-of-mind in a world where information overload surrounds us, using social media optimization strategies may just be the key differentiators between success and failure.