subject: Introducing the social web for optimisation [print this page] Introducing the social web for optimisation
The social web describes the latest trend of using the Internet to socialise, interact and network. Social media can be a great way to enhance current customer relationships or reach out and create new ones. Using the social web for optimisation purposes is more commonly known as Social Media Optimisation (SMO). As with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), most sites can benefit from some form of social media optimization but your strategy needs to be designed to compliment your company/brand/website. The main strategy of SMO is the same as SEO to make your site more accessible, with SEO it's for search engine spiders and with SMO its actual humans. The main purpose is to make your site so it's more easily linked to, more visible and regular updates blogs, podcasts etc whatever social media channels you choose to go down.
Now this hits an extremely important point choosing your social media. There are many different options, some that even the least technological person has probably not escaped the last couple of years, I'm talking about Twitter and Facebook. It is fair to say that these are the most popular but depending on what you want from your social media optimization than this might not be your best bet. You have to think of your audience, product, and most importantly recognise that just trying to sell yourself is not going to work. Other types of social media sites are Linkedin, MySpace, Blogging sites, social bookmarking resources like Digg and podcasts. Using social network sites and blogging pages takes careful consideration, it will be an interaction with an audience in this case potential customers. Many people are tired of salespeople trying to get them to buy this and that when they are online. You have to be real and talk about other things such as your day, whats going on your life, the world and then when your name is known and you know your way around the social media site your using, start dropping in positive aspects of your company/product, in particular special offers, rewards or incentives. Overdoing it (constantly trying to sell if you're not a global phenomenon) could damage your reputation.
As with search engine optimisation it is worthy to bear in mind that results may not appear straight away it could take a dozen attempts before you start seeing results. It is an ongoing strategy that should hopefully grow along with your company as long as you maintain the most important factors of being real, not using too many social media opportunities just the relevant ones please, and keep customer engagement and interaction up. Ways of measuring how successful you are is looking at retention rates, engagement tracking in social media terms how many likes and comments are you receiving, also take note of what time you receive more comments/digs/likes/messages in order to know when the optimum time for your posts/offer notes to be posted are.
