Social Media Optimization, eh? Let's See What's in Our Bag o' Goodies.

Danny's hoping that I'll post something on social media optimization and it's hard to let a soon-to-be-unemployed man down (too soon?). Thus, I give you my version of an introduction to the social media space - what's important, what's worth your time and how to go about working the SMO angle.

What Can You do with SMO?

Create pages that provide links back to your site (for both traffic and link popularity)
Create pages that will rank well in the search engines for low-moderately competitive terms/phrases
Build profiles on sites that can attract links, attention and contacts from other members
Contribute to the growth and value of social media sites

What are the Best Strategies?

To my mind, you first need to outline your goals - oftentimes, many of the purposes above will overlap, but you should still focus clearly on what you want to achieve. For many folks, SMO is about pushing a negative link out of the top 10-20 results at the search engines. For others, it's about getting free, low-hassle backlinks. For many of our clients, visibility itself is the achievement - getting recognized as a company/person who's consistently participating in the social media world has great benefits. Since the first two goals are fairly obvious, I'll put a little effort into explaining the visibility argument.

When you have a profile that people recognize on sites like Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia or in a set of industry blogs, you have a significant ability to influence discussion, create content and push visibility for links. My post on Digg's top users could easily describe Newsvine or Wikipedia. Once you've built up a profile that people recognize as a valuable source for information, you become more powerful in that community. Your bookmarks/articles/submissions/etc take on a greater value than the anonymous contributions of newbies. This mirrors the social structure of many web forums - big voices carry greater weight.

The ultimate goal of this visibility is to have the power to influence - once you have a voice, marketing becomes a soft-sell, rather than a hard one. Your SMO strategy may be to build links, rank a page in the engines or simply to generate leads, and all can be better accomplished with a prominent profile.

Assuming you have your goals defined, you'll need to know where to go to start profile-building, content creating and spamming on the square.

Where to Go SMOing?

The best sites for SMOing (Social Media Optimizing) are those that have achieved popularity enough to attract visitors, links and search engine rankings. I'll give a rundown of the ones I believe are valuable to participate in. I've ordered these from most valuable to participate in to least valuable (although there are hundreds below the 24 I've listed and probably some that belong on here that I've forgotten).

Each of these sites have different foci, unique benefits and demand attention to detail and a sub-strategy that considers the quirks and peculiarities of the userbase. For example, making it to the top of Reddit with a politically focused article is far easier than doing so at Digg (or Del.icio.us/popular). Experience is the best way to learn, so start browsing and playing. The only rule I'd apply to SMOing is to look before you leap. Don't just start spamming or submitting content to these sites without getting a good grasp on what's getting popular and receiving attention on them. There's nothing worse than getting banned from a small-time social media site because you spammed 'em, only to find out that site is the next Slashdot.

Good luck to all you SMOers out there. A year from now, the list and the tactics will surely be far different from what they are now.

Got any SMOing strategies of your own to share?

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