Web 2.0 (as an “Internet for the people” concept) has given rise to a great number of social services: web communities, message boards, blogs and, of course, social networks. For instance, the name of the largest social network in the world, Facebook, is one of the most popular queries of the Internet users in such search engines as Yandex and Google. The number of users who have personal profiles in social networks goes beyond the limit. For instance, in July 2010 Facebook had more than 500 million active users. Therefore social networks have a huge potential for promotion of websites, and now the notion of SEO is supplemented with new notions – SMO and SMM.
What is SMO and SMM?
SMO – Social Media Optimization – is the methodization of measures intended for optimization of the content for social networks, message boards and blogs. As opposed to SMO, SMM (Social Media Marketing) is the marketing strategy in the social networks which is not aimed at improvement of the site; it is intended for promotion and popularization of a site (good or service) in social networks.
In 2006 Rohit Bhargava, who is considered the author of the notion of SMM, has singled out five main rules of social media optimization. Nowadays the number of these rules has increased – there are 16 rules written by several authors and translated in many languages. Let us consider only some of them:
- Increase likability of your site – some articles should refer to other materials on the site.
- Create shareable content and make sharing your materials in social networks easy; for example, you can use RSS feeds.
- Reward inbound links. It will help your site to enter the circle of websites which belong to the same subject area.
- Encourage the mashup.
- Reward engagement and active discussion of the site content with the help of such services as polls, rating of the most popular articles and comments.
- Arrange the most useful elements (for instance, RSS subscription or the most popular articles) in the places where users can easily find them.
Just like instruments of search engine optimization, instruments of social media marketing can be both white hat and black hat. Black hat SMM reminds of common spam: information about the site is placed everywhere in the social networks; the topic of the site is not taken into account. White hat social media marketing includes such methods as posting notes and articles on popular news resources, participation in topical forums, commenting popular blogs.
Is website promotion in social networks really effective?
The ultimate aim of website promotion in the social networks (both SMO and SMM) is to attract attention of the participants of social networks and make them interested in the site you promote. For instance, if you create a common interest user group in such social network as Facebook, you can invite your friends, friends of your friends etc. to join it. Groups which unite a great number of participants attract attention of other users of this social network and very soon users join the group devoted to an interesting topic themselves. If you post links to your website, interesting articles, photos and videos, discussions devoted to interesting topics in such group, it will help to attract visitors to the site you want to promote. This plan of actions is suitable for other social networks.
Thus website promotion with the help of social networks is a really effective and efficient method of website promotion. However it is very easy to spoil the reputation of your site forever using black hat methods of SMO and SMM. That is why it is better to entrust social media optimization and marketing to professionals only. The specialists of web design studio WebStudio2U have considerable practical experience in the sphere of social media optimization and social media marketing in various social networks!
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website promotion,
web promotion,
promotion in facebook,
social networks,
promotion in social networks,
website optimizaion,
social media marketing,
social media optimization |
web promotion 
