These days, social networks have the increasing popularity. And if, before the search engines gave the bulk of traffic, now social networking sites just begin to play an important role in promoting of your site.
As well as to promote the site in search engines the concept of SEO is used, to promote your site in social networks the concept of SMO was introduced. That is, SMO – is a website promotion on social networks and on web2.0 sites.
SMO (social media optimization) – is an operation to increase site traffic through social media, which include:
• Blogs
• Social networks
• Social Bookmarking
• Forums
Appearance of the term “Social Media Optimization” is usually associated with the publication of Rohit Bhargava, in which he formulated the five rules of SMO:
1. To raise link popularity – to do such sites and to post such content, which will be referenced.
2. To simplify content adding from the site in social networks, bookmarks, RSS-aggregators, etc.
3. To attract incoming links, to encourage those, who makes links.
4. To ensure export and distribution of content with links to the source.
5. To encourage the creation of services that use your content – mash-up.
A special type of SMO – is a use of reputation services. Reputation Services – are the sites and portals that allow not only allocating the content or a link on your site, but also it can make users of this site to discuss and to evaluate it, leaving critical feedbacks, that to create a reputation of this site. Relationship of such services with social networks (possibility for users to post links of reputational resource pages on your personal page on a social network) further increases efficiency of link popularity of such type of SMO- promotion.
Feedbacks on foreign resources are important for site owners because of the fact that in this case it is difficult to generate public opinion manipulation.
Therefore, such feedbacks are considered not as promotional information, as well as the independent opinion of portal users.
Another important aspect of the SMO-promotion in this case – is the site owner’s ability to respond to feedback left on his/her web-site. Such opportunity is given not for anyone (this case can pull a larger number of cases of so-called black PR) – only for companies with the subscription right. It is done primarily for the benefit of the companies. The degree of authority depends on the answer of a company on feedback.
Not many people distinguish between SMO and SMM, for the majority – it’s the same thing. However, the issue of separation of these concepts to the various definitions is quite controversial. We can say so, that SMO is a certain part of the SMM.
According to the definition of experts, SMO (Social media optimization) – is a public media optimization or optimization for social media. SMO is not operations in social networks. The operations are done on a personal site. The operation is to prepare the site for the appearance of users from different social networks.
As defined by the same experts, SMM (Social media marketing) – is a social media marketing or marketing in social media.
SMM is not an operation on your site or a classifieds site powered by Flynax. SMM is an operation at belonging to other Web 2.0 sites, or on specially created their own, in any of the social networks, on forums and blogs. SMM is a tool for delivering of an entertaining for user product information contained on the main web-site.
We need SMO because there are millions of customers in Internet. In is important to promote web-sites not only in search engines, but also in social networks. SMO and SMM require at first the creation of useful and quality resources. That is the main thing – these classifieds sites are for people! If you follow this basic principle, the time and the money for the resource optimization can be significantly reduced, since the high quality and useful content will carry out a lot of SMM functions.