How to use social media

I think this is a question that many people would like answered. It is not a simple process and it definitely requires the ability of lateral thinking. There are the well known methods for example RSS Feeds that has been around for a while now. RSS feeds allows visitors to your site to easily receive information and content from your site within a reader. But Social Media Marketing has surpassed this step and has become more versatile.

I remember in SEO years ago the thought process was simple, the least you could link out to other sites the better as you would leak PR to another site and thus loose SEO benefit. A further issue was that by linking to another site you would loose valuable traffic or direct traffic away from your site. Social Media Marketing has changed this forever. Every marketer was forced to start thinking differently about online marketing in general.

Just how successful can Social Media Optimization be used in your sites? Here are a few important points I can think of.

Make the bookmarking process on your site a simple process. Make it easy for people to bookmark your pages on sites like Digg .

Utilize a dynamic site or perhaps a CMS that creates an RSS feed for new content on the fly.

Allow visitors to raise their opinion. I think here of a site like SEOmoz that allows you to track your own comments, it also has other really cool functionality that is closely related to SMM.

Make the process to tell friends about your content, simple.

Reward other webmasters that link to your content by returning the favor and even commenting on their blogs.

Create value for the visitors by obtaining reference status. Being used as a reference can be a definite way of obtaining natural backlinks. Wikipedia is the ideal example of a site that link to valuable resources. These days there are SEO benefits in doing this as well.

Be involved within a community as this not only add value to your opinions but also get the community to know you and to trust you.

One thing I have learnt from people I greatly respect in the SEO environment is to stay humble. Jocelyn and Paz are probably two of the most respected SEO's in the industry. But they will never forget who they are. They are mature in every way and they respect others. Therefore I would say that respect for others within your community is a definite point to remember.

Track your visitor's behavior. In my ebook about Designing a portal site by using data mining I mentioned that you should keep track of the recency of your visitors. Read the ebook as it will give you more insight on my thoughts on how to utilize data mining to increase recency on your sites by tracking user behavior.



Added note

After I wrote this article I was referred to this blog post on SMO by Glen Allsopp that reference a great blog post on the subject by Rohit Bhargava. I highly recommend that you read both these great blog posts.