With the growth of social media technologies on the Web, more and more companies are starting to think about their presence in the social media environment. For a startup company, getting listed on the front page of Digg.com can offer instant credibility and drive additional visitor traffic. It can also significantly increase an established company's brand recognition.

Rohit Bhargava was the first person to give a name to the phenomena of interacting with the online community and bringing online traffic from social media sources. Rohit outlined 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Incourage the mashup

Further along the line, other blog activists complement these rules . The rules turned into a variety of methods referred to either as Social Media Optimization (SMO) or Social Media Marketing (SMM). Thus, writing quality content and distributing it on the Web is more about marketing than optimizing, so further investigation and improving the terminology is required.

What is Social Media Marketing

Wikipedia defines Social media marketing as "the process of promoting a site, business, or brand through social media channels by engaging and interacting with existing consumers or potential consumers."
Social media channels may include blogging systems, social bookmarking sites, photo and video sharing sites and other technologies that support social interaction on the Web.

Being an Internet-based methodology, social media marketing is tied closely to non-Internet based methodologies such as offline word of mouth advertising. The commonality between the two lies in the viral marketing approach and establishing engaging relationships with the community. 
The difference lies in the medium in which the methods are applied: with social media marketing, word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social networks and websites.

SMM offers methods such as creating compelling content (aka linkbait) and publishing it on your blog or a blog syndication website, posting viral videos or pictures on content-sharing sites, posting details of your event on social events sites, etc.

In fact, social media marketing turns out to be another solution for your website promotion, which is very different from search engine marketing. The difference between SEM and SMM is the vector of efforts taken for your website promotion - SMM is more community-targeted than search engine targeted. As a result, the sources that bring traffic to your site are different. If SEM is about search engine visibility and high SE rankings that result in massive search engine traffic, SMM focuses on building online interactions with customers and helps you bring traffic from social media websites.

A pleasant "side effect" of SMM might be getting your link popularity and SE rankings improved as well: a good viral marketing campaign within the online community creates buzz around your brand and may result in new inbound links to your site appearing on the Web.

Social Media Channels

The channels used for social media marketing are as follows:
- blogging systems, blog search engines and blog syndication websites (WordPress, Blogger, MyBlogLog, Technorati,ActiveRain)
- RSS readers (Bloglines, Newsgator, Netvibes)
- social bookmarking sites (Delicious, Ma.gnolia, Furl, Buddymarks)
- social news sites (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine)
- social event sharing sites (Upcoming, Socializr)
- social recommendation sites (StumbleUpon)
- photo and video sharing sites (Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, Blinkx, Buzznet).

Be aware, however, that posting or sharing your content on such sites is not enough to conduct a successful SMM campaign. The main idea of social media marketing lies in offering interesting, valuable, or useful content that is viral by nature. Only in this case, your content will soon get widely distributed all over the Web and reap returns in high visitor traffic and brand recognition.

What is Social Media Optimization?

Social media optimization refers to facilitating the process of finding established content, sharing it, and distributing it across numerous social media platforms.

Like search engine optimization, SMO offers on-page optimization techniques and focuses on a site or blog that already exists. In other words, you do not need to write additional content to make SMO for your site: you just optimize your pages for the social media phenomena to make them easily bookmarked, embedded on other sites, or accessed via third-party media.

As Rohit Bhargava writes in his blog, "The concept behind SMO is simple: 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 (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs."

The methods of social media optimization may include, but are not limited to, adding links to providers of social bookmarking services so these pages can be easily submitted to these providers, integrating widgets from third party social media sites using APIs, adding RSS feeds to your site to make your content sharing easier, etc.

Examples of exploiting social media channels on the Web

Digg.com. Digg is a user-driven content site where members can vote, bury, and comment on stories submitted by other members. Getting onto Digg's front page often results in thousands of visitors coming to your site and it can have lasting ranking effects.

Newsvine.com. This is another social news site where members can submit news stories, comment on other popular stories, or create connections with regular users. Your Newsvine user name becomes your own subdomain, so be sure to use keywords in your profile.

Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a Yahoo-owned social bookmarking site. Del.icio.us allows members to publicly save bookmarks using tags. Don't be afraid to tag your own content: create a public bookmark in there and use your keywords or keyword phrases when you assign tags.

YouTube.com. YouTube is a popular video-sharing service owned by Google. Uploading a compelling video could bring you additional traffic from both YouTube.com and the Google search engine, because Google could soon index your video.

What you should remember from this lesson:

1. Do not underestimate the power of Social Media Marketing, as it can be an effective source of visitor traffic to your site.
2. Participate in social media activities to increase your brand recognition.
3. Apply SMO methods for your site content so the online community can easily find, share and distribute it.