Viral marketing is a good thing. And when you’ve optimized your social-media participating, you
can almost guarantee that your marketing will soon have that viral quality that you’re looking for.What’s different about social-media optimization?
In short, everything. Social-media optimization is not at all like web-site optimization, though it should
be part of your overall optimization strategy. Instead of adding keywords in the right places, tweaking
your meta tags, and digging up the right balance of links, you’re doing something different — creating
relationships, generating content, and tagging the Web. Don’t sell it short. The value of social media
has already been proven by many organizations on the Web.One thing to keep in mind as you’re considering social-media optimization is that it’s not as simple
as throwing a few crumbs at a social network and waiting for people to come along and share those
crumbs with their friends. They won’t.If you approach social media in that manner, you’ll end up wasting your time, and then when you
do get smart, the people who populate the social networking communities you tried it on won’t
be as easy to win over to your side. People don’t forget when a faker tries to jump in their midst
for purely marketing purposes. It’s the fastest way to send you right to the bottom of the social-
media pond.Social-media optimization is first about joining communities and creating relationships. And it’s
only by going through the process of becoming part of the community that your brand will begin
to be recognized by other community members. And that’s when your efforts will begin to pay off.When you’re optimizing for social media, you won’t be focused on adding keywords to your con-
tent or tweaking your meta tags. Instead, you’ll be focused on providing something that the mem-
bers of your chosen social network need. It may be an article, it may be tagging news stories that
are especially relevant to your industry, it may even be adding your expertise to a forum related
to your expertise. However you participate in the community, participating will be your best opti-
mization tool.The Value of Social Media
It’s obvious that social-media optimization has value. Look around at sites like MySpace, YouTube,
and FaceBook. These are all sites that no one thought would amount to anything. But they did.
People love the idea of being part of an online community. The generation of kids that have just
entered the work force and are growing up right now are Internet pros, and their parents are pretty
proficient with it, too.These people are involved in all kinds of activities online, from shopping and downloading music
to participating in social networks. The kids are networking socially for different reasons than par-
ents are, but both are getting involved.251
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