One of the social media’s well known commentators, Rohit Bhargava came up in 2006 with 5 rules for conducting SMO.

1: Increase your linkability
Static sites, those that do not have regularly updated content, do not attract repeat visitors, they are also of little value when it comes to linking to.

To overcome this your site has to be regularly updated. Sure, some material will not change, and it is fine to keep that static, but the addition of a blog, of news and article pages, ‘white papers’ will change a static site into one with potential linkability.

2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
Include calls to action for users to tag, bookmark and Digg* your stuff.

* Digg is a “place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web”.

3. Reward inbound links

Those of you who know a bit about search engines will know that inbound links from quality sites are one of the goals of SEO.  It is the same for blogs.

If you don’t have inbound links yet, start by providing your site visitors with useful relevant outbound links. You increase your site’s value to your visitors and overtime this is more likely to be relevant to search engine results when you are seen as a quality source of links to information in this area.

4. Help your content travel
Don’t waste good content. Recycle and Reuse it -  submit pdfs, video, sound files to other relevant sites.

5. Encourage the ‘mashup’
Mashup is a web app that combines data / functions from multiple sources into one application. i.e using Google Maps embedded into external sites. YouTube providing code to enable you to embed a video on your website.

By encouraging mashup you allow others to use your content or tools to create something new and different for users.

Getting started – dipping you toe into the Social Media waters

But the best way to start is to get involved yourself, even if you are just a participant and not authoring fresh content yourself. This is the best way to understand how it all works and how you could use it to promote your business or not-for-profit organisation.

When you understand the medium you are then in a better position to develop a SMO strategy – define your objectives and set goals for your Social Media campaign. Be fully aware of what your desired outcome is – reputation, sales, influence, credibility, charity, traffic/page views, etc.

For more rules on social media optimisation check out:

• The 5 rules of Social Media Optimisation by Rohit Bhargava

• Rules 6 and 7 by Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang
• Rules 8, 9, 10 and 11 by Cameron Olthuis of Pronet Advertising
• Rule 12 and 13 by Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal
• Rule 14, 15 and 16 by Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog

Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: Marketing, Social Media for Not-for-Profits