Social Media: Optimization or Marketing?

We're still "getting clear" on the nature and potential of social media's use in promoting website visibility. And it's getting deep.

In thinking about social media, I am starting to realize that it can be broken down into two main branches, just like SEO. For the sake of discussion, let's use the terms "organic SMO" (or "natural" social media optimization) and Paid SMO (which would be akin to Search Engine Marketing; we could just call this branch "social media marketing" or "SMM" for short).

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

I'm still just thinking this stuff through - so please bear with me for a bit.

In natural SEO, one main goal is to "optimize" a site's rankings for certain keywords. Another way to put it: natural (organic) SEO tries to increase the probability that a given website will rank well (and thereby be found) in the search engines for certain key terms.

On social medial sites, you also have keywords by which internal content is ranked. Only, they are usually called "tags". But if you think about it, a tag is nothing more than a keyword. It tells the internal search database, of whatever social media site you're on, that the content labeled with that "tag" should be delivered in a search for that tag.

Now of course, tags do other things. But this is one of their main purposes: to group content under certain categories so that people (and search engines) can display or retrieve that content when a user searches for it. In this respect, tags function like the metadata of a web page, for all intents and purposes.

Natural social media optimzation (SMO) is like natural SEO: where the goal is to get YOUR content that is on THEIR site to rank as well as possible in search results. When we think about SEO, often times we get narrowly focused on just "the biggies" - Google, Yahoo, MSN. But just as a good SEO doesn't neglect the long-tail keywords, he also shouldn't neglect search engine optimization on social media sites.

Paid Social Media Optimization (social media marketing)

Explaining the term by way of analogy, in the world of Internet marketing, the term Search Engine Marketing - or SEM for short - is usually used to refer to "paid online advertising," though it encompasses more than that. In the same vein, we are using the term SMM to refer to the sundry ways in which social media sites like Facebook or StumbleUpon offer paid advertising platforms to drive visitors to a website. This is really not much different than the ad serving programs of the search engines. You select keywords you want to bid for, you pay a price, your ads get seen.

So What Is Social Media Marketing?

Ah So. After much contemplation, we're finally starting shed some light on the nature of social media marketing. So the way of contemplation really does lead to the truth sometimes?

Definition: SMM, then, consists of natural and paid methods to make your Content searchable and findable within social media sites.

Perhaps the two types of SMM can complement each other, just as in SEM. For example, it is typical to run a paid advertising campaign while performing organic optimization on a web site. Both SEO and SEM work together, as, for example, when paid ads are used for rankings for more competitive terms, and the organic SEO for ranking in the less competitive ones as the site begins its new life.