What Is Social-Media Optimization?

When you understand what social media are, it’s not a far step from there to social-media optimization. It’s about using social media to spread the news about your web site. And instead of tweaking the elements of your web site, when you’re practicing social-media optimization you’re participating in social networks and tweaking the content that you share within those networks.

It’s through that participation and optimization that your site is distributed, and that’s what brings traffic to your web site. There are also a couple of added benefits to social-media optimization. First, it’s free in terms of monetary investment. There is no cost to participate in these networks except your time. But make no mistake about it; you will have to invest a chunk of front-end time into this type of optimization. You must become familiar with the communities and participate to establish a name for yourself before anyone will take serious notice of you.

The other benefit of social-media optimization is that it’s really a viral marketing strategy. Nearly everyone is familiar with a virus. It’s that nasty little bug that multiplies exponentially and makes you believe death would be an improvement. Viral marketing is neat, not nasty, but it works in a somewhat similar way.

When you can tap viral marketing for your online presence, word of your brand spreads like a virus — it moves faster and faster as the buzz increases, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it. And that’s good. If your marketing message has become viral, you can expect to see some serious growth in the number of visitors to your site and by extension to the number of goal conversions that you see.

Viral marketing is a good thing. And when you’ve optimized your social-media participating, you can almost guarantee that your marketing will soon have that viral quality that you’re looking for.