With the increase of new social media channels popping up everyday such as blogging platforms, social bookmarking sites, and social networks, it has created a new medium to generate targeted traffic to your business. A top story on one of the good social bookmarking channels like Stumbleupon can generate much more targeted traffic to your website than a top organic ranking on Google. To get this right, you have to practice social media optimization.

This is a form of word of mouth marketing online through the use of social media channel. With social media optimization, you are giving your target audience a good reason to visit your website because of it’s great unique content that they find valuable.

This process is completely different than search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is all about targeting the search engines where social media optimization is targeting your target audience. Social media optimization is about building your network.

Here’s a couple of tips to get started with social media optimization.

Social media optimization tips

Be active: Be active on the social web by regularly publishing unique and interesting content that others will find valuable and share with their own networking. Add a blog to your website where you can regularly publish new blog posts and syndicate the content to your social media channels.

Sharing: Make your content shareable. Add social bookmarking options to your content where it can be shared with a click of a button. This will help your content travel. This is a powerful tactic as your audience can now directly influence your marketing campaign.

Make your content linkable: By regularly publishing interesting content that help others, it might be pickedup by someone that wants to reference your work in their own. This is another powerful way that you can make your content mobile.

Be social: Social media is social by nature so don’t start your social media optimization campaign by only broadcasting your own sales messages.