Social Media Optimization (SMO) Origins and implementation

According to technologist Danny Sullivan, the term "social media optimization" was first used and described by marketer Rohit Bhargava on his marketing blog in August, 2006. In the same post, Bhargava established the five important rules of social media optimization. Bhargava believed that by following his rules, anyone could influence the levels of traffic and engagement on their site, increase popularity, and ensure that it ranks highly in search engine results. An additional 11 SMO rules have since been added to the list by other marketing contributors.

The 16 rules of SMO, according to one source, are as follows:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content to "travel" via sharing
5. Encourage the mashup, where users are allowed to remix content
6. Be a user resource, even if it doesn’t help you (e.g., provide resources and information for users)
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
8. Participate (join the online conversation)
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create new, quality content ("web scraping" of existing online content is ignored by good search engines)
11. Be "real" in the tone and style of the posts
12. Don't forget your roots; be humble
13. Don't be afraid to experiment, innovate, try new things and "stay fresh"
14. Develop an SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO a key part of your marketing process and develop company best practices

Bhargava's initial five rules were more specifically designed to SMO, while the list is now much broader and addresses everything that can be done across different social media platforms. According to author and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, Lee Odden, a Social Media Strategy is also necessary to ensure optimization. This is a similar concept to Bhargava's list of rules for SMO.

The Social Media Strategy may consider:

1. Objectives e.g. creating brand awareness, and using social media for external communications.
2. Listening e.g. monitoring conversations relating to customers and business objectives.
3. Audience e.g. finding out who the customers are, what they do, who they are influenced by, and what they frequently talk about. It is important to work out what customers want in exchange for their online engagement and attention.
4. Participation and content e.g. establishing a presence and community online, and engaging with users by sharing useful and interesting information.
5. Measurement e.g. keeping a record of likes and comments on posts, and number of sales to monitor growth and determine which tactics are most useful in optimizing social media.

According to Lon Safko and David K. Brake in The Social Media Bible, it is also important to act like a publisher by maintaining an effective organisational strategy, to have an original concept and unique "edge" that differentiates one's approach from competitors, and to experiment with new ideas if things do not work the first time. If a business is blog-based, an effective method of SMO is using widgets that allow users to share content to their personal social media platforms. This will ultimately reach a wider target audience and drive more traffic to the original post. Blog widgets and plug-ins for post-sharing are most commonly linked to Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. They occasionally also link to social media platforms such as StumbleUpon, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Many sharing widgets also include user counters which indicate how many times the content has been liked and shared across different social media pages. This can influence whether or not new users will engage with the post, and also gives businesses an idea of what kind of posts are most successful at engaging audiences. By using relevant and trending keywords in titles and throughout blog posts, a business can also increase search engine optimization and the chances of their content of being read and shared by a large audience. The root of effective SMO is the content that is being posted, so professional content creation tools can be very beneficial. These can include editing programs such as Photoshop, GIMP, Final Cut Pro, and Dreamweaver. Many websites also offer customization options such as different layouts to personalize a page and create a point of difference.