With the growth of the influence of social networks the websites’ optimization cannot be done not taking account of social media optimization (SMO). As search engines are using the data from social networks more than ever, every like and share of your content becomes a “vote” for that page’s quality and affects the ranks in search results.
For everybody who wishes his website to be trusted by search engines today it is vital to know the basic rules of social media optimization. Below are some of them.
Create high-quality shareable content. Some time ago site optimization was all about traffic and linking. Now your content can be shared, tweeted and liked but gaining this shares is possible only when you create “shareable” content for real people. The better the content is the more shares you receive.
Provide easy sharing. There are plenty of ways people can share your content and you should not bound them to a limited number of options to do it. Moreover, you should provide users with one-click sharing possibility so that they could do it with minimum effort.
Share content proactively. Once you’ve created some content you should start sharing it through all the channels. Post it to various social networking profiles, submit to different sites, promote it by sending to those who might be interested in this topic etc.
Join social networks. In order to spread your content over the Internet you need to be present at maximum popular social networks. And the more users the network has the more chances to be shared your content has. And you should definitely join Google+ as for obvious reasons it will increase your Google Rank.
Encourage the mash-up. The concept of mash-up when the content from more than one source is integrated and used for creating a new one is growing over the last years. It helps to make the existing data more useful engages users. So, you should be open to the possibility that your content can be combined with some other one.
Stimulate and reward engagement. While a few years ago marketers would only be concerned about inbound links, nowadays conversation and engagement matter a lot. Comments, discussions, posting and sharing content become the real currency in social web. And when it happens, you should be thankful and take care of rewards.
Remain active. Social media are all about staying updated and being viewable to the public. In a rapid social environment people see so much new content every day that you are risking to be missed. The more content you post and share the more you get noticed. Obviously, you should stay within reasonable limits and maintain the quality of your content.
From just a way of communication social media platforms have eventually grown to a powerful tool of promoting companies’ businesses. The infographic below describes major benefits of using social media for promotion and provides several tips on using the most popular social networks for reaching those goals.