To share the opinions, insights, experiences and unique perspectives with each other, variety of online tools are used. These include text, images, audio and video. Popular social mediums like blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis and vlogs are used by an average visitor to the site. Usually, younger the user, he or she is likely to read or write blogs on a weekly basis. Social mediums involve driving maximum traffic to any website and much analyzing goes in them, before they are used as an effective advertising tool. Social media optimization is in a way similar to search engine optimization techniques and provides linking, as to what drives people to these websites. Yet, there is the recognition that the SEOs are still the traffic generators, whose potential to attract the visitors can’t be overlooked.

The person behind the coinage of the term is none other than Rohit Bharghava. He defines the concept behind social media optimization simply as implementing changes to optimize the visibility of the site for an easy linkage. He further explains its usefulness, which is an increase in the visibility factor on the custom search engines popularly known as ‘Technorati’ and inclusion in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Another important aspect linked to the social media optimization is the unique marketing methodologies adopted to somehow spread the message rather than force an opinion on the readers. Bharghava has five rules for the bloggers out there, including increasing the linkability of your site, making tagging and book marking easy, rewarding the inbound links, helping your content to travel and encouraging the mass up.

Social media optimization is connected to a viral marketing technique where the networking is done through social book marking, video and photo sharing websites. In blogging, the content is shared through various search engines like RSS in the blogosphere and the special blog search engines such as the Technorati. A set of methods are used for the generation of publicity through social media, online communities and the community websites. Other methods assisting in increasing the traffic are adding ‘Digg this’ button, blogging and involving a third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries of ‘You Tube’ videos. Improved search rankings are primary hallmarks of the social media optimization. It is in fact, pretty much like the marketing that includes popular marketing techniques like usability design, community building etc.

The set of rules to ‘get there’ are participation, targeting your audience, creation of the content and to just ‘be real’. Social media is all about participation, which involves a reciprocal action. The conversation gets as real as it could get and helps to create awareness about the issues bothering the audience. It is a method where your message spreads faster and farther. A prior research in the kind of audience you are going to target helps to clear the picture. You should know your audience very well and other parameters related to them. Content should especially be kept simple and you should know how to make it catchier. Like a skilled juggler, who knows what makes people laugh, the content will determine the sale ability of an idea. Many new techniques are in the process of getting discovered, which will stimulate even better thinking.