The era of Internet search, which saw Google become the Web's dominant superpower, also contributed to the emergence of search engine optimization (SEO) as an important tool to help companies secure that highly coveted top spot on search engine listings.
SEO has since moved from being a neat little online hat-trick to becoming a vital tool for online marketing. Any company or individual serious about doing business online had to master the ins and outs of SEO and be able to apply it effectively to generate the traffic necessary to sustain the business online.
These days, social media is getting to the point where it can provide a second leg for online business to stand on. Social media's ability to generate traffic and cascade information across the numbers is of particular value to businesses and marketers.
And quite naturally, it has evolved its own tool for tapping into the huge user bases and seeding these with the relevant marketing messages, or engaging them in relevant interaction. One of these emerging tools takes its cue from SEO, and it's called social media optimization (SMO).
At this point in its evolution, SMO can be defined as setting up your company's social media assets and activities in order to get the most overall online presence and audience interaction and boost sales.
There are currently two ways SMO can be accomplished. The first involves adding social media tools and devices to the content itself. Things like Facebook's "Like" button and Google+'s "1" button let readers promote content to their friends and contacts.
Adding Twitter's tweet button lets people tweet the content URL for others to find, as do social bookmarking buttons. Other popular and effective devices include RSS subscription buttons, polls and third party widgets.
The second way SMO can be accomplished is by promoting content through a concerted, coordinated effort which includes blogging, commenting on blogs and forums, and posting status updates. This side of SMO will sound comfortably familiar to seasoned SEO practitioners who buckle down daily to do the exact same thing to get their content found by people using search engines.
SMO should matter to you because like SEO, it can drive traffic toward your sites to sustain your online business. Like SEO, SMO is anchored in content and works off on how engaging your content is and how easy you've made that content shareable across social networks.
The big difference is that while SEO works on drawing in traffic via search engine activity, SMO works directly with your contacts and followers, inducing them to share your content with their networks in a viral cascade that pushes outward toward the prospective markets.
There are challenges to successfully implementing SMO.
The most common include finding the time to stay active on the dozens of social media outlets, handling negative comments, balancing the kind of image you project to your social media followers, staying committed and following through with your social media initiatives, as well as measuring tangible results.
Again, some of these challenges will sound familiar to SEO practitioners, and perhaps they've already got solutions they can take out of their own bag of tricks so as to modify and adapt to the realities of social media marketing.
The key to succeeding at SMO is to build a strategy that focuses on socializing your website content. It's important that you be able to build up and cash in on referral traffic just as much as you would search traffic.
Using a social media marketing tool such as Isis CMS Toolbox frees you from having to continuously manage the details of your content posting and sharing and helps you consolidate the interaction generated by your content and posts.