Lisa Lambert

The Palm Beach Post does a great job with engaging in social media.  We have surveyed our readers to find out what they are looking for, what they want to see and hear, etc.  You can also find widgets throughout the Palm Beach Post website for Facebook and Twitter.  The Post even has a page dedicated to the social media tweeps on the site. I'll even be listed there soon! Optimizing your site for social media involves a lot of the same techniques you use for search engine optimization, along with some other techniques.  If you are going to target social media, the biggest names are Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.  Personally, MySpace isn't really my target audience as they are mostly younger teenagers and preteens, but this may be the audience you are looking for.  There are also social bookmarking sites but I'll cover that in another post, as well as blogs. Social media is important to include and optimize social media as a part of your online marketing mix because this can be a huge driver of traffic to your website.  If your site gets bookmarked, or gets mentioned in a post for a major blog you can see a lasting long term increase in your visitor base.  Search engines, especially Google use this as part of their ranking algorithm as well as many other facts. This all creates links back to your site.  If high quality, high ranked, and very relevant sites are linking back to your site, you will leverage their traffic to help increase your search visibility. So what is SMO?  It's just fine tuning your site so that it is more easily linked to from social media sites.  SMO is like SEO in that you utilize important keywords and phrases. Here's what you need to do:

• Improve your link worthiness - Put content on your site users want to read.
• Make Bookmarking Easy - This is simple.  Include share features on your site.
• Participate in Communities - This just means don't just post links to your site with your social media.  Interact with the people in your community.  If someone links to you, give them something back in return.  So be an active participant in your networks.  Social media is a two way street.

I know this was a long post.  There will be much to come later.  If you have more questions, you can always post them as comments or send me an email. Cheers!