What is Social Media Optimization?

February 27, 2015        
By: Michael Foster

Social media is now over a decade outdated and is already central to folks’s web habits. With this development a well-established reality, do entrepreneurs must optimize for social media—and if that’s the case, how can they?

Search engine optimization is an outdated trick in each on-line marketer’s playbook. But social media optimization (SMO) is new and controversial. With search engine optimization, the technique is easy and the aim clear: you need to get increased up on Google’s web page rating for sure key phrases, and also you write, current, and produce texts that may please Google. This is nonetheless a significant a part of most entrepreneurs’ lives.

The aim and technique on the subject of social media optimization is a lot fuzzier. You can’t write your method to the highest of Facebook’s information feed, and even in case you might, that received’t assist on the subject of Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and no matter else youngsters are utilizing lately.

For some, the reply is to supply viral content material. Virality is a really tangible idea, which is why it turns into a aim for thus many individuals. Viral content material is content material that individuals shortly and readily share. But what is shareable and what isn’t?

Some corporations promise to have clear data-driven solutions to this query, and a few startups have tried to generate income promoting these solutions to huge entrepreneurs. They haven’t completed nicely. The downside right here is that what is viral doesn’t rely on knowledge—it depends upon human psychology. What are folks actually eager about, and what do they actually need to see?

When we have a look at corporations who’ve succeeded within the SMO sport, we shortly see a sample. The greatest and strongest writer who has optimized for social media is Buzzfeed. Second to them can be Huffington Post.

What these two corporations have completed is to supply large portions of content material starting from the light-hearted, the cheesy, they hyperlocal, the controversial, and the attractive. Some of their content material is stolen, resulting in some bad consequences, however total, the drive to a ton of content material that appeals to a ton of niches has paid off handsomely. Buzzfeed has reworked gifs and listicles into an $850 million empire.

A distant however important third can be Vice Media, a as soon as small web writer whose tales on prostitution, medication, and North Korea have made it a juggernaut value $2.5 billion.

While they lack the dimensions of Buzzfeed or HuffPo, they’re already value greater than the previous, and will turn into their very own publicly listed firm sooner or later.

This, all because of movies on controversial subjects interesting to what Freud referred to as the death drive and sexual sublimation. In different phrases, realizing how folks secretly take into consideration and need loss of life and intercourse, Vice appealed to the lizard minds of the plenty and created a multi-billion greenback empire in consequence.

SMO, then, is about producing content material that individuals take pleasure in and can share, and the winners are the individuals who have produced an enormous quantity of content material with out regards to guidelines of propriety or legality.

This is a particularly tough narrative to promote to e-commerce corporations, who need to keep away from offensiveness and don’t have the time or funds for an enormous onslaught of shareable content material. Thus the hunt for the magical algorithm that optimizes corporations for social media will proceed, and can proceed to yield little.