Social Media Optimization (SMO) involves techniques of making a website compatible with social media sites so that its awareness and content are easily spread through social mediums and online communities by users and visitors of the website. An effective Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaign necessitates proper SMO of an online business without which the desired results of Social Media Marketing cannot be achieved.
Some methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogging, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Besides these methods, anything done ´on-page´ in an effort to make the site more compelling for users and enabling them to spread it through social media sites, such as improving the design and usability of the website, can also be included in Social Media Optimization. All the ´digg this´, ´add to delicious´, ´follow us on twitter´ and other such buttons spread across the web today represent a simple example of SMO.
Some of the social media marketing tools that most businesses commonly use include blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn.