Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for attracting visitors to website content by promoting and publicizing it through social media. SMO is a subset of social media marketing, which is promoting and publicizing products and services in general through social media. SMO is one of two online methods of optimizing (attracting visitors to) website content; the other method is search engine optimization (SEO).
There are two categories of SMO methods:
1. Social media features added to the content itself, including: RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos
2. Promotional activities in social media aside from the content being promoted, including: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles
Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.
Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.
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