Future Business Ideas

You may have heard about social media marketing (SMM), which means marketing through social media applications like Digg, StumbleUpon or Reddit. Social media are known for generating a lot of traffic in a short time. For example getting on Digg front page will usually bring thousands of visitors in just a few hours.

The social media are also known for quickly voting down anything they do not like, which includes anything spammy. This is why marketing is not always successful. Social media optimization (SMO), which is one part of SMM, refers to optimizing your web site to do well in social media.

There are three important aspects of social media optimization that you must understand: firstly, you must know what kind of content works well in social media; secondly, social media types usually hate ads; and thirdly, you need to making voting easy for your visitors.

Using multimedia content - videos and images - is an easy way to get noticed in social media. It has to do with the fact that those browsing through social media items rarely stop to read lengthy pieces of text, while images are quickly absorbed. Have a great image at the beginning of an article and your social traffic may stop to read the text too.

Jokes of any kind work on almost any social site. Other than that you should find out what the users of a specific site enjoy. For example, Slashdot usually focuses on computer and technology related issues, while also politics and current news do well on Reddit. Try exploring the site you are targeting and you will quickly see what topics the majority of content is about.

Advertising often converts to negative votes in social media. The users are often tech-savvy enough to avoid AdSense anyway, so leaving out ads from those pages that you use for social marketing will not even hurt your income. It is definitely a good idea from a social media optimization perspective.

You can encourage even those visitors that come from other sources to vote by having social voting buttons on your web site. Examples include AddThis and ShareThis buttons. They allow voting and bookmarking through multiple social media. Having one of them on your site allows every visitor to easily submit your site to their favorite.

Social media optimization is based on adopting the style social media voters like for your web pages. For most effective social media marketing you must optimize the site by removing unnecessary advertising and making it easy for your visitors to submit their vote. This will make sure the social traffic you get is greater and lasts longer.