Social Media Optimization
Social media optimization (SMO) is the strategic use of interactive web-based and
mobile technologies to make information highly visible and easily disseminated across
social networking sites. These technologies, also called Web 2.0, encompass a
combination of user-generated content on wikis and blogs, social news and social
bookmarking sites as well as RSS feeds and social networking sites such as Twitter,
Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram that re-use, remix and repurpose
content with the intention to generate viral publicity, or become widely
circulated.
In the past decade, social media has changed not only how individuals
communicate with one another but also how political campaigns are conducted. These
technologies have fundamentally shifted the balance of power between candidates and
voters as well as the relationship between governments and citizens. For example, many
scholars have extolled the virtues of tools like Twitter and Facebook and their use in
helping to give birth to the Arab spring movement, which ignited rebellions that resulted
in the overthrow of governments in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia by people newly
empowered through social media. Social media has revolutionized a voter’s or citizen’s
ability to impact political discourse and decision-making and has given rise to such
efforts being called Open Politics, Politics 2.0 or participatory politics. Politics 2.0 is the
idea that participatory technologies will transform an individual’s ability to follow,
support and influence political campaigns.
Previously content producers created websites or blogs and used search engine
optimization (SEO) techniques to improve the chances of their sites rising to the top of
search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Today those same producers rely on users of
Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon or Digg, and other social media to repost their content
and send users back to their sites. According to social media expert Brian Solis, the
metadata -- or data about data -- that users organize using keywords, tags and categories
to classify user-generated content is uploaded to social networks. This creates an index of
online content – text, images or video -- that allows others to discover it.
Like search engine optimization, SMO can drive traffic to a website. However
SMO differs from SEO in a few significant ways. Search engine optimization makes use
of strategically placed HTML code, keywords and tags to drive traffic to a particular
website; Social media optimization takes content to where users are. While SEO may
penalize a site that repeats its message, SMO rewards those whose messages are repeated
across multiple platforms. In fact, SMO gave rise to use of share icons that make it easier
to forward an item across channels. SEO draws users to content on the site that created it,
while SMO facilitates the flow of that content to where the influential people are. With
the increase in “walled-garden” social media communities such as Facebook and Twitter,
more users distribute information to their personal connections through links and retweets.
Consequently, people doing the linking have become influential arbiters of relevance and
that relevance can also mean that content surfaces high on search engine results pages
thus making it easier for others to find. As a result, social media optimization becomes
the online version of valuable word of mouth promotion. Social media upends the
gatekeeping barrier created by editors and writers and permit citizens to tailor the
conversation, which has sparked the erosion of mass media authority. Social media
differs from the traditional mass media model -- source-message-channel-receiver
(SMCR) -- in which a sender transmits a message through a given channel, which is then
translated and distributed with limited opportunity for feedback from the intended
receiver. According to scholars Emily Metzgar and Albert Maruggi this top-down, oneway
model of mass media is ceding to interactive media technologies that give the
audience more influence.
