The 4 S’s of Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization may sound like a ridiculous term, because how do you optimize social media? But it’s in Wikipedia so it has to be legit, right? And a quick Google search shows that important people have visited and revisited the topic. That’s enough for me to tout a term.

Social Media Optimization it is…

Seriously though, contrary to the Wikipedia definition I think that Social Media Optimization is extremely similar to Search Engine Optimization from a goals perspective. The overall goal for both is to drive traffic back to some sort of home base. I’ve been thinking about this concept for the past few weeks, as I begin to wrap my head around the redesign of our corporate website / blog. I’ve decided to put those thoughts down here in a post, and have come up with:

The 4 S’s of Social Media Optimization

In no particular order, primarily because I don’t find defining the four S’s importance in a linear fashion to be appealing. At this point they seem to be interdependent. Here you go:

stuff Otherwise known as content, but I needed an S and stuff works. You need to have content attached to a web address in order to optimize for search. This differs from Social Media Optimization because social media is not necessarily bound to the confines of a single URL. Social Media is the omnipresent stuff around the internets. Social Media can be bound to a link, but it can also be a photo, an audio recording, a video, or the written word and spread around by itself. As I have personally discovered this summer, the stuff you make needs to resonate with a specific audience in order to drive traffic back to home base.

syndication Is just a fancy way of saying that you’re going to push your stuff from your home base to social sites. This is you talking to people you have relationships with and can be accomplished by tweeting, posting to Facebook, Digging, etc. I think that every social network with a profile or group capability allows you syndicate your content on their network and that is something that you’re going to want to do… You’ve spent a lot of time building up that Twitter follower list and Digg Army, find out how much it will work for you by syndicating your content in the appropriate ratio for that network.

sharing This is what you want people to do, share your stuff with their people. Ideally, a lot of people will share your subject matter with a lot of other people. This makes even more people aware of your stuff, than you are able to do on your own, and puts you well on your way to becoming a viral content producer. (Can’t wait for that job title to hit Monster.com, wink wink) A lot of thought needs to be put into sharing. What stuff do people want to share? Where will they want to share it? How will they want to share it? After it’s been shared, how do you drive a percentage of them to perform an action that helps you accomplish your goals? You know, the basics.

simple I would argue that simplifying things is the linchpin S in the 4 S’s of Social Media Optimization. Your stuff has to be simple to understand and simple to share to get people to care about it enough to actually perform the act of passing it along to their networks. A lot of cool technology exists that makes stuff increasingly easy to share. Mashable really pushes the envelope in this department… I get really excited when I come across things like the Socialize plugin and Meebo Bar because they make it easy to share stuff from blogs. Life is hard enough. Simplicity is something we should all strive for with our on-line properties.

What Do You Think

Is Social Media Optimization relevant today? Should I be thinking about it when I think about designing websites and applications, or is Search Engine Optimization all that anybody needs to ever worry about, ever? Hit me up in the comments below.

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