What is SMO?
As defined by Rohit Bhargava who coined the phrase in 2006:
“implement changes to optimize a site to be more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines, and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”
This definition still holds, but the ability to enable SMO is easier. Buttons for twitter, facebook, etc making content easily sharable, and formats which are easily portable between sites (with sites themselves enabling multiple formats including video). This creates a more fluid culture of information sharing and a better way to potentially achieve virality & syndication with out alot of SEO gaming. Let the power of the crowd drive your message, content, product, etc to the masses. SEO/SEM is becoming second stage to SMO/SMM now.
Lets run some numbers,
Twitter – (statistics)
Users: 105 million users (as of 2010 -probably 150m now) and 180m uniques per month, and 75% of it comes from outside third party applications.
Demographics: And according to the huffington post women tweet 12% more than men. According to most shopping sites (like shop.com) women are the primary shoppers in the US.
Facebook – (straight from their site)
Users: More than 500 million active users, 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day, Average user has 130 friends.
Over 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month and 10k websites are integrated each day. (Last update April 2010 – # users is at 600m today)
Demographics: 55%+ of users on facebook (US) are women, and the most traffic is from women on facebook.
With over 700m people using twitter and facebook, and over 35B events occurring on just these two sites (55%+ women), its hard to ignore the value proposition for e-tailers everywhere.
SMO/SMM and e-commerce
E-tailers need to start focusing on marketing into these two mediums (and others) with everything from pure ads, special discounts/campaigns, loyalty programs, and closing a purchase.
Most e-tailers only syndicate across multiple affiliate locations comparison shopping engines, blogs, shopping directories, affilitate networks, etc. Most are not addressing the combination of product syndication and SMO/SMM as a one stop powerful tool. Sites like onestopfeed are enabling e-tailers to take advantage of this growing trend and maximize sales.
