For years we have all, you as a client, us as digital professionals, spent time honing our skills getting the right keywords in our articles, linking the pages correctly, setting up meta tags and so on and so forth all to get the right Search Engine Optimisation.
However, the recent years has seen a massive explosion in social media channels allowing users talking to each other (sometimes about your services) outside your area of control.
This has led to a culture of sharing and recommendation all leading up to today where Facebook has overtaken Google in providing traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN (source).
I suspect your first reaction is “Wow” similar to mine.
However, looking at the recent trends it is not surprising at all. Last year Nielsen reported that Social Networks are more popular than emails (source).
Where Search Engine Optimisation looks at your content and what it says, Social Media Optimisation also looks at what the users do with your content.
Some of the new elements to look at are sharing, participation and content migration.
Sharing
Make your content as easy as possible to share and encourage users to share. Use sharing tools for social bookmarking such as AddThis.com or CMS plugins such as Sexy Bookmarks.
Also encourage sharing through more traditional digital tools such as Email a friend forms and Bookmark this page links.
Participation
Users are more likely to share content they have participated in, both because they find the topic engaging but often also to “show off” to friends.
Allow users to comment on your site, encourage feedback on content ("was this useful?"), use competition driven features to get users to repost your content, create social media applications that can deliver timely content to the users’ preferred channels and don't forget RSS feeds.
Content migration
Social media channels facilitate a lot of traffic, but why force users away from their preferred home on the internet? Why not bring the content to them?
If you know your audience are active users of a particular social media channel make sure your content appears in those channels.
Managing content across various digital channels can be a lot easier than it might sound.
For example set your website News section to post automatically to Twitter, use a LinkedIn profile as main home for your company information and pull the content into your About us page, use bookmarking tools such as Delicious as the host for your useful links and pull the delicious bookmarks into your Useful links page etc.
Search Engine Optimisation is not just a quick fad, this trend will continue to grow and the need to think about Social Media Optimisation is here, now. The sooner you do it, the sooner your audience will Friend you and perhaps even Unfriend your competitors.
16 February 2010
Is Social Media Optimisation replacing Search Engine Optimisation?
For years we have all, you as a client, us as digital professionals, spent time honing our skills getting the right keywords in our articles, linking the pages correctly, setting up meta tags and so on and so forth all to get the right Search Engine Optimisation.
However, the recent years has seen a massive explosion in social media channels allowing users talking to each other (sometimes about your services) outside your area of control.
This has led to a culture of sharing and recommendation all leading up to today where Facebook has overtaken Google in providing traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN (source).
I suspect your first reaction is “Wow” similar to mine.
However, looking at the recent trends it is not surprising at all. Last year Nielsen reported that Social Networks are more popular than emails (source).
Where Search Engine Optimisation looks at your content and what it says, Social Media Optimisation also looks at what the users do with your content.
Some of the new elements to look at are sharing, participation and content migration.
Sharing
Make your content as easy as possible to share and encourage users to share. Use sharing tools for social bookmarking such as AddThis.com or CMS plugins such as Sexy Bookmarks.
Also encourage sharing through more traditional digital tools such as Email a friend forms and Bookmark this page links.
Participation
Users are more likely to share content they have participated in, both because they find the topic engaging but often also to “show off” to friends.
Allow users to comment on your site, encourage feedback on content ("was this useful?"), use competition driven features to get users to repost your content, create social media applications that can deliver timely content to the users’ preferred channels and don't forget RSS feeds.
Content migration
Social media channels facilitate a lot of traffic, but why force users away from their preferred home on the internet? Why not bring the content to them?
If you know your audience are active users of a particular social media channel make sure your content appears in those channels.
Managing content across various digital channels can be a lot easier than it might sound.
For example set your website News section to post automatically to Twitter, use a LinkedIn profile as main home for your company information and pull the content into your About us page, use bookmarking tools such as Delicious as the host for your useful links and pull the delicious bookmarks into your Useful links page etc.
Search Engine Optimisation is not just a quick fad, this trend will continue to grow and the need to think about Social Media Optimisation is here, now. The sooner you do it, the sooner your audience will Friend you and perhaps even Unfriend your competitors.
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