What is Social Media

Social Media? Never heard of it. Don't worry, we will explain what is social media and its uses in advertising and marketing!

As with all things on the Internet, evolution is the only constant. With that said, let's look at the natural evolution of search engine optimization. Now, before we start, let me say that search engine optimization or SEO is alive and well in the virtual world. Adding to this traffic driver are two new terms - Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimization (SMO).

SMM and SMO? We dont even know what is Social Media!?!?! Social media is simply placing your advertisement and marketing based on where people meet to interact.

Now that we know what is social media itself...lets get back to our new traffic drivers...

SMM and SMO are two of the most popular buzzwords in Internet marketing today and are the next revolution in marketing and website promotion.

What Is SMO and SMM and What's The Difference?

Social Media Optimization is all about optimizing your website to receive traffic and attract it.

Social Media Marketing is all about what you do off-site to drive people to your website.

Social Media Optimization - A Definition, of sorts....

SMO is when webmasters tweak and refine their website so that the content is easily spread able across social marketing mediums and online communities.

It can be picked up by visitors who want to share the content with others, and is able to be accomplished on the page via social networking feeds.

A simple example of this is StumbleUpon , where you Stumble sites and content that you like so that your friends and other Stumblers (people who stumble about the web) can find it. StumbleUpon is one of the biggest Social Media search engines tailored to the likes of its users.

Digg is another one where you Digg This and the more Diggs an article or post receives, the more people will see it, notice it and visit.

So lets break down what is Social Media Marketing

This is off-page via social media and the distribution of content via social web or viral marketing. If you create compelling content, they will come is the philosophy behind SMM.

What that refers to is that as you continue to create compelling, controversial or trendy information on your website, people will bookmark it, share it with others and it will spread it virally to other websites.

This is all done off-site in communities and forums where you hang out and participate in discussions with people who are interested in the content presented by your website.

So now that we know what is social media, lets check out how we can use it to our advantage!

Making Your Website Social Media Friendly

Static is dead . . . literally. You can no longer throw up a site and leave it sitting there. If you know anything about search engine optimization, you already know that is the surest path to complete death.

Sites today are dynamic, constantly changing and always updating.

You need to be able to allow people to comment on the stuff on your website, take your content and spread it via social media marketing sites like Del.icio.us , Digg and StumbleUpon and offer easy ways to do via icons on your site.

Sites must have RSS to be alive, because people want stuff delivered to them via RSS readers. This is the dynamic part of your site. It grows and expands as you add content, but it grows on its own via input from outside sources.

Add audio, video and pdf files that you can submit to sites that will list your site both in their directory.

Places like and FreeIQ.com Scibd.com and FreeIQ.com are great places to put your PDFs.

You can submit to video places like YouTube, MetaCafe and others. There are always new ones popping up and the features of each are slightly different.

There are guidelines when utilizing SMM and SMO... which should be followed for best results. You will need to study them, but they are also pretty easy and a lot of fun to implement including increasing your linkability, adding icons to our website to make bookmarking (on social bookmarking sites) and tagging easy.

Your site should at least be set up for RSS, DIGG, tagging with Technorati and IceRocket and the ability to tag your site at Del.icio.us.

This is a community so that when somebody links in to your site, you will want to go to their site and comment or at the very least, linkback to them.

These are just some of the basics. Lastly, stay on top of the social marketing industry. It is constantly changing and evolving. This article may already be out of date. This concludes are article on "What is Social Media".

We know there are several sites mentioned without the text link in them. Have no fear, because we plan on building a page in our Affiliate Tools section of our site where you will have links to all of the social media sites.

In Addition we plan to have an article for each one on how you can get the most out of each site.So keep checking back for updates!

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