Increasing Reach viaSocial Media Optimization

What is Social Media Optimization?

Social media are the forms of media where people come to share their ideas, interests, passions, and opinions, and give people the ability to share the message with others.

Social Media are created by “the users” - interaction is possible and interaction can make the content more valuable.

Examples: YouTube.com, MySpace.com, Facebook.com, Wikipedia, Flickr.com, and del.icio.us.

These websites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vblogs to allow users to interact.

Social media optimization is a strategy to enhance a website so that it will be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites.

Social Media Tools For Us…

- Social Networks

- Social Bookmarking

- Forums/Message Boards

- Online Groups.

- Blogs

SMO Characteristics

Participation: social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between the concept of media and audience.

Openness: most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, feedback, comments and sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content – password protected content is frowned on.

Conversation: whereas traditional media is about “broadcast”, content transmitted or distributed to an audience, social media is better seen as conversational, two way.

Community: social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively around common interests – be that a love of photography, a political issue or a favourite TV show.

Connectedness: Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, via links and combining different kinds of media in one place.

Social Networking

• MySpace –100 million accounts• Facebook – favorite among US teens and

young adults• LinkedIn – top professional networking site• Second Tier

– Friendster– Bebo– Orkut– Virb

Social networking websites Usage….

• ss

Source : Ipsos 2007

Social Network Marketing & Optimization

Create Company & employees profile in Social Networking Websites like Myspace, Orkut & German popular local networking websites.

Promote company on your profile via Banners, Text Ads & Promotional Stuffs.

Getting more targeted friends (sort by demographic criteria). Leaving “friends” requests.

Scrapping in other members profiles.

Joining existing Insurance communities in Social Networks.

Creating Insurance Community.

Sending Bulletins to community members.

Sending mass private messages (with banner ad).

Writing keyword-rich content with outbound links containing keyword-rich anchor text.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine. Tags usually refers to keywords. In Tags we need to specify keywords by which others can search us.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Examples includes : digg.com, del.icio.us, Propeller.com, StumbleUpon.com, reddit.com & many German local Social Bookmarking websites (Need to search out & start doing Bookmarking on monthly basis).

Social Bookmarking : Best Practices

Encourage users to tag, bookmark or vote on your content

Discover which social bookmarking communities best resonate with your readership

Make friends, especially with a top user

Become a top user

Don’t just bookmark your own content, participate in the community

Don’t buy votes

Don’t self-promote

What are Forums?An online community where users read and post topics of common interest. Forums can be on anything like Webmaster Forums, Travel Forums or Insurance Forums. Peoples joining forums have different objectives but common interest. Some join for information, news, help; while some join for marketing their products & services among the community.

Examples includes forums.digitalpoint.com, www.seoonhire.com/forums/, http://www.seoonhire-forums.net/

How to Promote Yourself in a Forum?

Become a member of all the forums belonging to your interest e.g. insurance. Usually subscribing to local forums of Germany will be beneficial rather than subscribing to any international forum.

Start as a regular user. Participate in threads initiated by other members & try to contribute something by helping them out or providing some information useful to the forums members.

Try to build reputation in forums through active participation & useful posts rather than just promotional stuffs.

Promote company website in Signature. Signature can be updated in visiting User Control Panel. Links should be provided to the company website with proper keywords like link to www.seoonhire.com should be provided with the keyword SEO Services.

With time start posting promotional stuffs in a bit different language that it doesn’t sounds to the members that you are spamming the forum with just promotional stuff for your company.

How to Promote Yourself in a Forum?

Promotion of website via Signature Links

Promotional Thread

What are Groups?

Groups / Discussion groups are similar to forums where peoples sharing similar interest join the group & help out each other.

There are many groups in google, yahoo which we are usually subscribed related to different interest.

We need to join Insurance, Investment related groups by Google, Yahoo or any other in Germany.

We can also open/start our own groups & initially start promoting it like virals among common friends.

We need to grow members of the groups & promote among them via Emailers.

What Are Blogs?

Blog is a web journal which is otherwise called as a "weblog". entries are made on a regular or daily basis in a blog like an online diary.

This can be about and be used for anything at all, it can be used for news, reviews, products etc for a business, organisation etc. This is great as it helps the user stay in touch with the website with new and up to date information.

http://researchinsurance.blogspot.com/

How Blogging should be done?

Start a blog on Topics like Car, Car Insurance, Legal Insurance..(In German). There are many free blogging space available like blogspot.com, wordpress.com (its better to start a blog in local blogging space).

Try to do atleast 1 post a week. You can just copy paste news on the industry from other sources but give reference to the source. Alternatively you can rewrite in your own words 7 publish on the blog.

In the navigation panel SEO On HIre through links & banners.

Post Press Release of SEO On Hire on the blog a news item.