The advent of Social Networking has led to the creation of new terminology in Internet Marketing - Social Media Optimization (SMO). It is unique way of increasing website traffic. New channels of marketing are now opened and ready to be explored with this latest buzz. Whether SMO takes the place of SEO and settle as the most prominent marketing tool for increasing traffic is yet to be seen.
Before we proceed further, it will be inevitable to know what this is all about and how similar is it to the search engine optimization.
From the name itself it’s clear that Social media is the platform for SMO. SMO uses exclusive ability of social media services to gather a global audience – people sharing information and building relations online. Marketing Gurus are leveraging on social media sites like Twitter to lure people into websites instead of search engines. Today you will find marketers spending time Twittering for SEO, a pursuit involving cultivating Twitter accounts, building a following and being followed. By this way, they develop relationship with users and blend with rest of the twitter population and post attention-grabbing tweets about their clients website.
This Twittering for SEO involves developing communities within Twitter which sends and receives marketing messages. The traditional SEO aims for first page listing on search engines whereas twittering for SEO is the proverbial word-of-mouth. The online microblogging feature of twitter enables messages to spread fast all across the Twittersphere. The recipients of these messages are real people, hence meaningful traffic is translated.
Many of the traditional techniques are also included in Twittering for SEO. Relevant content, perceptive marketing, link-building, and community participation for generating traffic remain effective methods to market a site.
Nonetheless, there are many differences between the twittering for SEO and standard search optimization. As we see, the audiences for SMO are real people exclusive of bots, an extra care is required while marketing a concept or site. For ensuring wider audience for a product, the fundamental SMO means understanding the target audience more carefully. Therefore content needs to be relevant, useful and valuable to the users. Also, SEO twittering means active paticipation in community threads for sustaining awareness of the product or website being marketed.
All in all, SMO is a far better choice if used properly for generating meaningful traffic to your websites and product.

