SOM Report

What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

The various forms of Social media would include Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Social media is a term to define the varied activities that integrate technology, social interaction and the construction of words and pictures.

Today most of us use, social media applications like Google (reference, social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality) and Flickr (photo sharing). But in relation to Internet marketing, Social Media could be referred to as a collective group of web properties that are driven by users for example, blogs, discussion boards, vlogs, video sharing sites and dating sites.

Understanding a Landing Page

You must have seen that as you click on an advertisement or a search-engine result link, you are taken to a different page. This page is the landing page. It is also called a lead capture page. The landing pages are usually customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements during a pay per click (PPC) campaign. However, it would be interesting to note that every page of a site indexed by search engines could be a potential landing page.

Thus the aim of search engine optimization (SEO) is to leave few landings to chance. So now with the growing sphere of social media, even Social media optimization (SMO) or social media marketing (SMM) is in many ways understood as a technique to viral marketing. But here, through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites are ways that are used to create product awareness. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogsphere and special blog search engines such as Technorati. Unfortunately, the problem with Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the inability to understand what to measure.

Optimizing Social Media Landing Pages
 
You certainly understand the value of landing pages, especially if you run PPC campaigns. They are critical for your success and if you run email-marketing campaigns, they are all the more important. In fact, landing pages are critical to organic search engine marketing, press releases and just about all Internet marketing efforts. Therefore, it is no wonder that the Internet experts spend the same amount of time on building a landing page that usually their clients spend on meeting up to the demands of their customers.

First of all, you need to understand that through your social media site you are trying to make a conversation with your customers, not a monologue. Therefore, it is imperative that your site must facilitate a two-way discussion. In the arena of advertising, the process of social media optimization could be best rated as a practical, quick and most organic solution. The promotion program under the category of SMO would involve a number of strategically different ways including social media, online communities and many other community websites. Many other associated issues like promotion of bookmarks and related links are also among the beneficial aspects of SMO that collectively make it the most important advertising necessity.

While social media marketing campaigns are becoming increasingly popular among Internet marketers and is today considered as a mainstream marketing tool, it is important that we define some method to measure the success or effectiveness of such campaigns.
Though for measuring the success of an Internet marketing campaign, you have the traditional methods of putting it down by:

• Increase in New Visitors and Page Views
• Increase in ROI

SMO metrics

But unfortunately, we don't have a definitive metric for measuring social media optimization success. SMO campaigns are mainly aimed at people and building relationships. Therefore this makes it very difficult to quantify the success of a social media optimization campaign.

But a logical view as offered by Eric Peterson would be to calculate the effectiveness of Social Media Optimization by measuring how "engaged" a visitor is, while visiting your site. Eric Peterson’s Blog Web Analytics Demystified.

Eric defines an engaged visitor as one who is involved in:

1. Reading my weblog
2. Reading other user generated content on the web site
3. Participating in a truly social activity facilitated by my site
4. Joining a social network of web analytics people
5. Contributing content directly to the web site
6. Submitting a comment to my weblog
7. Emailing me directly

So if you take into account these points, you would be able to understand your reader's participation in a better way. This in return would help you even garner a success rate for yourself.

Targeted content

In order to optimize any landing page, you must first take into consideration the source traffic. Being able to recognize the URL would help you filter performance. Then you should create some targeted contents that would help you identify your core users.

SMO Testing

Though usually we have a fair bit of idea on the site performance, still it is vital that we should test all the landing page optimization ideas in a controlled environment. This will once again help you zero down on your loyal users. There are two ways through which you gain Social Media Optimization (SMO). Firstly, by referring to on-page tactics you can improve a website for the age of social media. Such optimization includes adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily 'saved and submitted' to and for these services. The other way would be Social Media Marketing, which however, is an off-page characteristic of Social Media. This includes writing content that is remarkable, unique and newsworthy.

Contextual Relevance

Only by having relevant content on your site would you be able to make your site appealing to your users. Typically a user would come to your site to read the content, not to click the ads. So you should give good relevant content for the reader to read. Try to have dynamic content on your pages. Content that is frequently changed would keep your readers coming back for more. Whereas on the other side, Static content could turn boring to users which may result in low click-through rates.

Conclusion

Many of these aspects could be incorporated into your social media landing page. But what should be of importance is that your social media-landing page must be focused on the terms that brought people to the page. This would make your audience come back for more.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994. This is a series on search marketing best practices.