Social Media Marketing and Optimization
It seems like only yesterday that search marketing was all the rave in the Internet marketing world. But times change, and technology moves forward. Now everyone is crazy about social media. Blogs in 2006 became like websites in 1996; no one knew why they needed one, just that they did. Now we have all new terms like social media marketing and social media optimization. Let’s start with the difference between the two.
Social Media Optimization
Think of social media optimization in the same way you think of search engine optimization. You have a website that is made to do a specific thing. Maybe it’s made to sell products, or get people to fill out a form, or simply read your articles and click on your ads. But the site was probably not made for social media.
To make your site more social media friendly really just requires some basic knowledge of the tools available, and some ideas on how to make your website more interactive. For example; do you have a blog? A blog can allow you to easily produce more content to your website, which in turn brings in additional search traffic, which of course can equate to dollars. Are you allowing people to bookmark your pages through tools like del.icio.us so that they can easily return to reference your site when needed? And when it that not appropriate? Are you leveraging social network tools like LinkedIn to easily promote your business through your own workforce? Are you leveraging a wiki to cut down on the amount of customer service emails and phone calls?
These are the questions that would be explored in a social media optimization campaign.
Social Media Marketing
Optimization is about getting your site to leverage these new technologies, but like the name applies social media marketing is all about the marketing through them. Are you using Technorati tags to expand your search visibility? Are you pushing out instructional videos through YouTube to help promote your products? Are you leveraging the power of the blogosphere to create buzz about your new promotion?
Social media marketing does not take the place of traditional advertising, but it can greatly augment the efforts and help produce surprising results.
