Social media optimization or SMO is a form of word of mouth marketing through the use of social networking, social bookmarking, blogging and media sharing (photo, video) websites. The focus of SMO is on relationship and trust building. SMO is about increasing traffic flow to your social media content pages.

SMO focuses on securing traffic from sources other than search engines. When your content is placed on your website such as with a blog, traffic flow will increase to the website.

SMO is giving people a reason to visit and link to your site because of great original content. Links from social media back to your site are important for SEO. Improved search rankings are often a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media marketing is very different than traditional marketing. It’s about publishing interesting content, creating relationships and trust. It’s not about selling, though people do prefer to buy from those they know and trust.

Use social media to build your brand and your reputation, not to sell products. Brand yourself as a leader. Your brand is what you represent, what you care about and your connection to others. You want to be the unique and persuasive voice in your market. Your goal is to create a cultural following.

Social media participants can interact with you and learn your products or services in the process. Social media focuses on sharing content using RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Sharing is made easy by adding social media sharing and bookmarking buttons along with your content.

Combine SMO with your SEO efforts. Use it to bring traffic to your website through links and gain better search engine rankings.

Business networking is a time honored method of growing your business. You can use business oriented social networking to deepen relationships and form closer bonds. Online Networking is a concept that connects people together on a global social media community. Social networking has expanded our opportunities to meet and interact from our local neighborhood to the international scene.

10 business oriented social networks

1. Biznik: Biznik is a business networking site that has the unique feature of publishing articles by the members. This is an online community of entrepreneurs and small businesses.
2. Ecademy: A social network for business people. Ecademy provides networking opportunities through a combination of online and offline events. Create contacts and share knowledge.
3. Entrepreneur Connect : The social network for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Participates in groups include starting a business to women entrepreneurs.
4. LinkedIn : A business oriented social networking site. With over 100 million registered users worldwide. Members interact in discussion topics on LinkedIn Answers and a large searchable directory.
5. Networking for Professionals: Business networking for owners, network marketers and managers looking to expand their client base. Combines online business networking and real-life events.
6. Plaxo: An online address book and social networking service. This allows you to keep up contacts even as they move jobs.
7. Ryze: A free social networking website designed to link business professionals, particularly new entrepreneurs. The site claims to have over 500,000 members worldwide.
8. StartupNation: a community focused on starting up and growing businesses. They provide an exchange of ideas between entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners.
9. Young Entrepreneur : An online forum based website for entrepreneurs worldwide. A great resource for start-up CEOs, founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, mentors and investors.
10. Ziggs: Similar to LinkedIn. Create a professional online presence for yourself and increase your online visibility. An online brand management resource.

For a long time the web has been moving social. For SEO, links from blogs, social bookmarks and user generated content like Squidoo are considered valuable links. We now have confirmation that Bing and Google are using links carried in Tweets as one of their ranking factors. SEO and social media are increasingly converging with the lines between them becoming blurred.

SEO and social media go so well together. Links may be the currency of SEO that finance top rankings. Social networking and social media are becoming the relationships side of SEO that seems to be the future. These link connections from social media are highly valued, especially by Google.

Not all links are weighted equally. Links from sites or people with a higher “social authority” are given more weight. Social authority is developed when a person or business establishes themselves as an “expert” in their niche and becomes an “influencer” in their field.

What creates a high social authority?

1. Quantity: Having more friends and followers
2. Quality: Having more important friends and followers.
3. Topic: Social authority will likely be related to relevant subjects.

Links from Twitter may be “No-followed” but they still create social signals that influence rankings. If the tweet is made by someone with social authority, a celebrity, then they will create ripples in the search engine results.

Social authority is about exerting influence. Celebrities and experts that are “socially connected” will be able to wield their influence in a way that will greatly affect rankings.

Matt Cutts of Google has confirmed that Google is now using social signals as a ranking factor. This includes links within Twitter Tweets. Just 6 months ago (May 2010) Matt had stated that Google did not use social signals as a ranking factor… but this has now changed.

Bing and Google have now both confirmed that Links shared through Facebook and Twitter have a direct impact on rankings. They will calculate the social authority of a user (how many people you follow and how many people follow you. etc.). The higher the social authority, the more trusted the link and the more the link will count.

Does this mean that Retweets are the new link building? These links are counted even though the Links on Twitter are already nofollowed and most are shortened anyway by a shortener so there is no keyword anchor text. But these links will count.

Are people going to move from creating link bait to creating Retweet bait?

It is clear that Google is moving toward social in 2011. The impact of social media will continue to increase. Social media is perceived as more resistant to spammers since most communities are self-policing. It will be interesting to watch how this continues to unfold.

Your customers do read and use social media. It is in such high use today that every business should be incorporating social media marketing into their marketing strategies. So how do you get started? The first step should be setting goals.

Just how big is the opportunity?

• 5 of the top 10 highest-traffic websites (Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger and Twitter) are social media websites.
• With over 500 million users, if Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world.
• 5.4 billion videos were watched by US audiences in October 2010 with YouTube having the majority share of viewers.

Before you start your social media marketing initiative, you need to establish your goals of what you want to accomplish. How is social media going to help your business? Many companies that are new to social media have a hard time with this because they don’t understand what is possible.

Sample social media marketing goals

• Increase brand awareness using social media marketing
• Monitor and measure the number of mentions of company brand / name online.
• Gain a better understanding of how your target audience feels about your brand / company.
• Build and develop relationships with your current customers.
• Increase search engine traffic to your website by 40% by the end of the year.
• Generate 50% more quality sales leads over current levels.

What are the next steps?

1. Start by listening and monitoring.
2. Select which specific social media sites to start with.
3. Start small and stay focused.
4. Measure results.
5. Make adjustments and changes.
6. Expand your campaign.

SEO may drive traffic to your website, but how do you improve your conversion rate? Using social media, merged with eCommerce is one of the answers. This combining of ecommerce and social media is called social commerce or sCommerce.

Social commerce means using social interaction to help shoppers make their buying decision. This could be user ratings, reviews, opinions and conversations concerning a product or service.

To be most effective, user feedback and reviews should be placed as near the purchase decision point as possible. Shoppers use s-commerce for research and reassurance. The idea is to make people comfortable so they’re more likely to purchase.

Social Commerce is an important part of conversion optimization. Conversion optimization is an art and a science. It offers methods for making changes to your website in order to improve conversion rates and ultimately your bottom line. A conversion can be any action that moves a visitor further down the conversion funnel, whether it’s a phone call, filling out a form or even bookmarking a page.

Today consumers want and expect e-commerce websites to deliver social features including:

1. Product reviews and ratings
2. Consumer feedback
3. Wish lists and favorites
4. Q&A functions
5. Blogs
6. Forums and chat rooms
7. How to videos

Social commerce does not direct the message, it allows these conversations unfold. You may want to encourage participation through promotions, contests, user-generated content (photo and video) uploads, and whatever else drives social interaction.

Social commerce uses the voice of other customers. This feedback and reviews works because users trust other people like themselves.

The world has moved online. The rise of blogs, videos on YouTube, mingling on Facebook and tweeting has changed how we socialize. Marketing is now about relationships. Wikipedia and Google have made information and knowledge something that can be acquired on demand.

Communication is not for the elite. Barriers have been removed. Bloggers and tweeters are now the experts and the commentators on world events. Everyone has the opportunity to be heard. The web has made the world accessible and reachable no matter whom or where you are.

Boundaries have been removed. Social networking has expanded our opportunities to meet and interact from our local neighborhood to the international scene. Social media can take you anywhere.

Marketing and advertising are not about communicating with the masses. It is now about reaching and interacting with the individual. Niches and micro niches have replaced the large market channels.

Marketers use social media to build their brand and reputation, not to sell products. Your brand is what you represent, what you care about and your connection to others. You want to be the unique and persuasive voice in your market. Your goal is to create a cultural following.

Politicians are listening real time to what is being said. Feedback is instantaneous. Facebook, twitter and blogs are now the working tools of PR.

Today we live in a world where you can’t hide. The world has become more transparent… not less. There is no more lurking in the shadows. Social media shines a light on everything and everybody.

The online marketing landscape has changed tremendously in just the past few years. It is getting increasingly chaotic. The old style of controlling your market is dead. It is about interacting and conversing with your market at a grassroots level.

Social media marketing does not mean spamming. Social media marketing is about creating unique, newsworthy and remarkable content on popular sites such as YouTube, social networking sites and other social sites. Social media marketing is about authenticity, creating relationships and trust.

Unfortunately there are many that try to exploit social media using spam methods. Spam is no longer limited to emails. These are 6 types of spam that hurt social media today.

1. Spam Messages: This is sending unwanted ads and commercial messages on social networking sites. Marketers will target a certain demographic and send unsolicited messages.  Facebook spam is a major issue today.
2. Twitter Spam. Sometimes called follow spam. This affects Twitter and other micro blogging services. This is when you follow a huge number of people for the purpose of getting them to follow you back (as opposed to actually caring about what they have to say).
3. Profile Spam: These are profiles set up on social networking sites for the purpose of creating links and not for the purpose of contributing to that community.
4. Comment Spam: These are comments placed on blogs with the sole objective of getting links back to their website. Some are blatant ads for weight loss, discount prescription drugs or pornography sites. Others are more innocuous with the commenter saying   “Excellent post. Keep up the good work.”
5. Spam Blogs: These are blogs that automatically gather search results using feeds from services such as Google Alerts. Spam blogs can also aggregate feeds from other niche blogs. These can then promote affiliate sites or generate money from advertising. This often called autoblogging.
6. Social Bookmarking Spam: This is usually done with automated programs and services that will create “personas” to promote a particular website. These programs automatically create social bookmarking links on sites like Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon.

There are many choices for a business owner to use in promoting their business. Social media marketing is a strategy that works with just about every business. Use this to increase the effectiveness of your other marketing strategies.

Here are the seven forms of social media marketing that are used by businesses today. Choose the ones that best fit your business and your targeted customer.

1. Blogging: Use blogging as your central content strategy. Integrate YouTube into your blog, automatically Tweet with each posting, and display your posts on your Facebook and LinkedIn.
2. Twitter: Post short updates with this micro blogging tool. Use Twitter to engage in conversations, link to your blog and to other interesting articles. Twitter is limited to 140 character posts.
3. Facebook: This social networking platform has become the top business networking site where businesses can connect with your audience, interact with fans, post videos, discuss topics and place social ads. Ideal for B2C marketing.
4. LinkedIn: This is your professional networking tool. Here you can form alliances, share knowledge, attract new customers and cement your company brand. Very strong tool for B2B marketing.
5. YouTube: Create short educational videos that relate to your niche. Videos are great way to reach and engage your target group. Embed these videos on your blog and website. Use attention grabbing titles and reference your website URL and then wait for the videos to go viral. Build up a Youtube channel that lists all your videos in one place.
6. FlicR: This is your photo sharing strategy. Name your photo images with keywords and they will come up highly in searches particularly on Yahoo. The best images are original, creative and professional photos that appeal to your target market. Allow your photos to be freely used as long as you receive credit in the form of a link with specific anchor text.
7. Digg is a social news site where content is submitted and voted on by the community. You can occasionally submit your own material, but you need to do this sparingly and interspersed with other sites you find appealing. Popular content can create excellent referral traffic.

The great part of social media marketing is your ability to track results. Analytics will give you the ability to measure referral traffic and links to your company website. Social media is the new frontier in business marketing and many companies are reaping the rewards.

Social Media Marketing really went main stream in 2008. This is according to Google Trends. This was when many “early adopter” businesses began implementing social media in their marketing campaigns. But will social media marketing work for all businesses?

When the Internet went public in the early 90s, many businesses were slow to adopt this new media into their marketing. It was the early adopters that took full advantage and are now leaders in the Internet world.

Today if a company doesn’t have a website or use email, they will have a hard time reaching their market or even being taken seriously as a business. Today only about half of all small businesses even have a website. How does this translate into using social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the new frontier, much the same way as the Internet was in the early 90s. The Internet replaced traditional media (Newspaper ads, print Yellow pages, direct mail). I am not saying websites will be going away the way print newspapers have, but social media has become the best way to reach and interact with your best buyers.

There are still businesses asking “Are my customers are looking for me on the Internet?” The answer to this is a loud YES… no matter what type of business they are in.

The new question is “Are my customers using and reading social media?” The answer today is most likely. Very soon this will turn into a loud YES. Now is the time to work social media into your marketing strategies.