Optimizing for Social Media:

First of all I would like to thank John for having me guest post, secondly I would like to make it clear that I am in no way a developer. Basically, the idea of this post is to give developers a few ideas as to what social media optimization should be considered when building web apps, sites, or whatever in order to maximize social media reach and exposure. This is a very basic overview but I would be happy to go into more details from a marketing branding perspective if anyone has questions. So whether you're building a third party twitter or facebook app, or just an addition to an existing site here are a few things to keep in mind:

Content is King

Dynamic content is necessary, by this I mean frequently updated content that speaks to your audience and elicits response. Content and development don't always go hand-in-hand but developing and/or implementing a content management platform that makes creating and updating content simple will make your job way easier in the long run. Making it ridiculously easy to publish content will make your product that much more successful from a marketing/editorial perspective.

Sharing and Feed Options

Many of you may know that Facebook is now the leading source of link sharing on the internet. However, email and other sites like digg, delicious, among others rank very high as link sharing sources. Adding third party apps like ShareThis, AddThis, or Te!! a Friend are ways to insure that content can be shared and distributed across a multitude of sites.

Feed options are also very important. Eventhough the number of internet users subscribing to feeds has slowed down, having an RSS feed is a necessity for many other reason, i.e. twitter feeds, facebook notes, etc... Having a feed set up will help increase the reach of your content and/or features from a marketing perspective.

Facebook Connect

    * Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
    * Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
    * Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site.  Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

"Currently, there are more than 1 million users of Facebook Connect and many experts believe that Facebook Connect will win the single sign-on battle.  Over 10,000 sites already use it on their sites including large brands like Hulu, Digg, and Discovery Channel.  Facebook Connect works by allowing users to log-in to participating third-party websites with their Facebook IDs.  Facebook Connect allows websites to easily provide their users with a trusted form of authentication, a real identity, easy friend linking, “dynamic privacy,” and easy social distribution (sharing content)." - from the Facebook blog (http://blog.facebook.com/).

Open ID Logins

Like Facebook Connect, Open ID logins allow users to easily share your content across their active social networks. When it comes down to it the more available avenues for sharing the more likely your content will travel.

Get Involved

Create a Facebook fan page and start using Twitter. The more involve you are in your community the more successful you'll be. Both platforms, when used correctly, can be very powerful tools. It may take a little time to figure out how Facebook and Twitter will work for you, but the benefits will surely be noticed.

Consider an Overall Strategy

It's never a good idea to rely on one medium as internet marketing strategies are evolving on a daily basis. It's important to remember that Social Media is only one component of an overall SEO/marketing strategy. Other components to consider include, but are not limited to, keyword usage, message design, site branding, and link building.

Adam Carter is a social media manager for a large internet marketing company. He can be contacted on twitter, facebook, myspace or by email if you have any questions.  Look out for some more articles by Adam in the future!

Email: aqcater@gmail.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/aqcarter

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/aqcarter

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