Methods for Improving Your Social Media Optimization Services

These are the seven steps that can be incorporated to improve Social Media Optimization- 

1. Engagement - encourage more engagement, sharing & reciprocate
2. Authority - become a notable authority in your field of expertise
3. Leadership - harness originality & creativity, be a Thought Leader
4. Social - be social, find and engage sociable experts in your field
5. Media - know your social media platforms to maximize influence
6. Optimization - improve technical aspects to increase optimization
7. Reputation - build your reputation as a reliable qualified source

These seven steps provide a good benchmark against which you can assess and plan your current SMO activity.

If I may be allowed to stand on the shoulders of a giant I would add my thoughts to each of these seven steps as follows:

 Reputation

Your reputation in my view starts with ensuring you are either an expert or you act as an expert curator. This means undertaking thorough research and producing original content or curating quality content. This will make you a respected and qualified source.

Your reputation is also about how you engage and support people. Your reputation will be enhanced if you openly share your content and expertise including content that is not your own, engage with others through discussions and commenting, and if you are friendly and helpful to people.

I think fundamentally your reputation is enhanced by simply being helpful to people.

Engagement

You need to actively engage with your audience. This can include commenting, mentions, shares, likes, and plus ones. No one is as smart as everyone so share other peoples' content and provide a good user experience by providing feedback and comments.

You need to target the networks with which to interact and make it easy for people to interact. It may be that people will interact with content on your site but you may find a far greater number of people willing to interact in their existing communities such as Google+ communities and LinkedIn groups. You can combine these by using say Google+ comments on your blog. Asking users to create accounts on your site will discourage users from commenting so use existing social logins such as LinkedIn or tools such as Disqus.

You can also encourage people to engage with a call to action, for example if you find this article helpful please shares it. If you think I have missed anything please add your comments below.

Authority

There are many aspects to authority. Search engines are interested in ascertaining what individuals and brands are seen as authoritative and trusted by real people on the Internet. The most obvious example of a move in this direction is Google Authorship. Setting up Google Authorship can help establish you as an expert and show your profile prominently in search results. For example I have spent many years researching the elearning market and writing a monthly market update. Thus when you search for 'elearning market' you will hopefully see my result (image below) with my picture and a link to my profile.

You can also enhance your authority and the value of content through social proof. In essence the more your content is shared through plus ones, retweets, bookmarks or likes the more it indicates the value and usefulness of your content. It may also encourage others to read your content. For example, my recent post on Google+ and SEO received over 2,500 plus ones and a thousand retweets. Hopefully this means a fair number of people found the article helpful and shareworthy. I am sure it also helps the SEO, as if you search for "Google+ SEO" the article was at the time of writing appearing high on page one of the results page.

Leadership

To me leadership is about high quality research, thinking and original content production.

A leader will research everything they can about their areas and share thoughtful insights which will add value to your audience. Poor quality content will be perceived as such and as a consequence will not be shared. As a leader you can also create value for your audience through content curation. This means adding value to content by providing a summary, adding context or a perspective to the content you are sharing.

Social

You also need to build high quality networks; quality potentially matters more than quantity. Seek out the experts in your field, read what they say, engage them in debate and share your ideas.

Media platforms

It is important you focus on the right platforms and communities Where does your audience hang out? Find and focus on the platforms, communities and groups where your audience hangs out. Some platforms are far more effective in improving the SEO benefits of SMO than others. In my view the most effective platform is Google Plus for many reasons which are set out in the article I mentioned on why Google Plus will improve your Search Engine Optimization.

This was reinforced in recent days by the post I mentioned from Dustin Stout on social signals and Google+. His research led him to conclude that Google is counting all activity from all Google+ posts back to the original blog post. Thus in Dustin's view "Google is trying really hard to give your shared links all the social credit they deserve."

Optimization

I have included below some of my thoughts on the practical and technical aspects of optimizing your SMO below. Share buttons - make it easy to share for users by adding share buttons to your content. You should also show the numbers of shares to demonstrate social proof. Social Icons - group and display your social icons in a prominent place on your site.

• Subscription options - group together subscription options such as email, RSS, and newsletters.
• Shareable content - some content is more readily shareable such as infographics or 5 top tips articles. I think this is partly because it is short and scannable. However, I hope and believe longer but well written content will also be shared.
• Social login - use social login options to make it easy for users to comment.
• Rich snippets - social networks pull in rich snippets, data designed to summaries the content of a page. These are very useful for users. The different social networks pull in this data in different ways. Facebook uses OpenGraph, Twitter uses Twitter Cards and Google Plus will take values from OpenGraph, you just need to set up your authorship profile for your rel="author" tag to work correctly.  If you use WordPress you can use the Yoast plugin to manage and optimize these rich snippets
• Title tags - Optimize your title tags for sharing, especially on Twitter where there is a character limit and include your name.
• Images - they really do say more than a thousand words. Include images that add value and include an image that can be used as a thumbnail for your content.
• Thanks again to Joshua Berg for his Real Social Media Optimization framework and for the work of Dustin Stout and Mark Traphagen. I hope through my reflections and additions I have added some value to the way you think about and approach the Social Media Optimization of your Search Engine Optimization.