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Social marketing - the next edge in Internet marketing




  • participating in forums
  • getting known in blogs by writing comments or guest blogging
  • writing content, aimed to go viral
  • help your potential customers
  • interact with your colleagues in the industry
  • add opportunities for customers to personalize their experience on your site and interact with it

and so on (read more on marketing through forums and blogs).

Social media optimization

Some are viewing this social media thing from quite a different angle. One thing that struck me in the first article on social media optimization (SMO), was that the idea behind SMO is focused on optimizing a website. It is followed by a host of followers, who found more ways to socialize a website:

Update: corrected the associated names with the links. Thanks, Cameron.

Here's a list of things to remember about social optimization:

  1. Increase your linkability
  2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
  3. Reward inbound links
  4. Help your content travel
  5. Encourage the mashup
  6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn├втВмтДвt help you
  7. Reward helpful and valuable users
  8. Participate
  9. Know how to target your audience
  10. Create content
  11. Be real
  12. Don├втВмтДвt forget your roots, be humble
  13. Don├втВмтДвt be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
  14. Develop a SMO strategy
  15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
  16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices
  18. Syndicate your content
  19. Add buttons to make syndication easy
  20. Be a good citizen of the web (to build good karma)

While the list above is pretty good, it is quite unusual that, when the whole notion of 'social' behaviour is related to humans, some people still talk about websites. So, when it comes to socializing, 'social media optimization' seems rather awkward to use. Thus, when it is about the customers, it'd be more logical to use 'social marketing'.

Social marketing: doing it for the people

One of the first things you need to do for your website is to focus on the customer. Sure, you need to have the search engines in mind, when you build a website. You also need to know how the search engines work with your website, rank it in their results and what matters there. You also need to know which links are the best and why.

But before all that, you need to focus on the needs of your potential customers. Why are they looking for your product? What words they use? How to make your website usable for the people? Do your customers need an accessible website?

When it comes to social marketing, there's just one principle you need to follow: give to get. If you focus on providing value to your customers, you can easily find ways to make sure your customers have the best possible experience. You can also find ways to optimize and promote your website.

In short, you gain an entirely new perspective on how you can interact with your potential customers and colleagues, which will all result in more word of mouth recommendations, trust and appreciation of your efforts.

Rounding up

In the end, when the search engines learn how to almost completely evaluate how your website matches the interests of the people, better off will be those, who have been working for the customers from the start. Simply because that was a natural way to create, optimize and promote a website.

Read more about social marketing:



Thanks for sharing this! I'm passing this on, just like you suggested. :-) Will be back for more. :-)


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