Social Media Optimization is a term that has come in the limelight lately. It is a new online marketing strategy of advertising. Advertises recognize the reach of social media and want to take the full advantage of it. As per Wikipedia “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and blogs."

Social media optimization is to build a community to rally around. These are all websites that can now be used as places to put out your marketing message. Spreading messages through blog posts and blog search engines also fits the bill. It is all about making something easy to spread, which, by the way, used to be called word-of-mouth.

In search media optimisation, there is an attempt to make your website visible in the social media. The basic concept of social media optimisation is to implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines.

There are some fundamental rules of Social media optimization.

1. To increase your link ability - Do blogs, content, aggregation etc.

2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy - include calls to action for users to tag, bookmark and Digg your stuff.

3. Help your content travel – should have diversified content to increase the mobility of content.

4. Reward inbound links - List blogs which link back to you via permalinks, trackbacks or recently linking blogs (like the Yahoo & Google blogs do).

5. Encourage the mashup - Let others use your content or tools to produce something a bit different or outside of the box with your stuff, even RSS.

6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you - Add value and outbound links, even if it doesn’t help in the short term, it will in the long.

7. Reward helpful and valuable users - Give your contributors and readers the recognition they deserve.

8. Know how to target your audience – knowing your target audience is a very significant thing. You can’t cater to everybody’s need. You will have to be practical for who your target people are. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can't. So find out what appeals them and what can you give them.

Social media sites are also going to be the big ad revenue generating sites. Social media marketing, if done right, can have a significant impact on brand awareness and popularity. However, many companies fail to utilize this cheap (and in many cases free) method of marketing. By looking at social media ranks for companies, and comparing it with mainstream media ranks for the same companies we can see which brands are taking advantage of this new medium and also draw conclusions about the effectiveness of social media.

Tags:- Social media optimization, Social media optimisation, Social media marketing, Socialmediaoptimization, Search engine marketing, Search engine optimization, SMO, SEO