Admittedly, I’m no expert on this new-fangled concept of “social media optimization”. I don’t offer social media optimization services. I don’t operate a social media optimization company.  But I do have opinions on how social media optimization for poker websites can and should be done. Over the next few days I’m going to write a series of posts about poker social media optimization strategies.

What is Social Media?

I’ve heard of social media over and over again, but I couldn’t really define it if you asked me to. So I did some research. Turns out that the specific definition of social media is content that is created by users using scalable and user-friendly applications. The thing all social media channels have in common is the user interaction aspect of the content. Examples of social media sites include:

• Blogs & Microblogs
• Forums & Message Boards
• Social Networking
• Bookmarking & Tagging
• Wikis
• Social News
• Photo, Video & Audio Sharing
• Opinions
• Questions & Answers

These are all types of websites that a poker webmaster would do well to consider developing, but developing your own poker social media site is not “social media optimization.”

What is Social Media Optimization?

Social media optimization is NOT a subtopic of search engine optimization. But like SEO, SMO (social media optimization) is concerned with getting more traffic to your website. But instead of having a goal of getting more traffic to your website via search referrals, your goal as a social media optimizer is to get more traffic to your website via social media referrals.

Social Media Optimization for Linkbuilding and SEO

A side effect of social media optimization can be extra links which might or might not help you with your search engine optimization efforts. More links to your site can mean better search placement overall, which is good for SEO, but it’s important to remember that it’s a side effect of SMO, not an end goal. The end goal is traffic from social media sites.

Must a Poker Webmaster Utilize Social Media Optimization in Today’s Internet

Social media optimization is not a requirement for a poker website. In fact, I know seven figure a year webmasters who never think about social media traffic at all. Or they focus on a single social media channel that they’ve decided to become very, very good at.

Social Media Optimization Tips for Poker Webmasters

I’m going to provide some general social media optimization tips for poker webmasters in this post, then in future posts, I’m going to give specific advice about optimizing for specific types of social media websites.

1. Design your content so that it’s easy for people to use social media to link to it. At the top of this post you’ll see a button for a service called “ShareThis.” It’s one of only many options and plug-ins that you can use to encourage people to share your content via social media. If you’ve written content that’s really worth sharing, add something like ShareThis to your content. You can put it at the top of your content, at the bottom of your content, or both.
2. Be somebody. I’ve given this advice before in various SEO articles I’ve written, but having an identity is even more important in social media optimization than it is in SEO. Social media is all about communities. People with no identity don’t get noticed in a community. Social media optimization isn’t a strategy for people who want remain anonymous. You can always use a nom de plume if you just absolutely cannot stand to have your name in print on the web.
3. Include a byline with your content. This is closely related to #4. A big sign of trust is having the name of the author on an article. Anonymously written articles just look like spammy nonsense.  I knew a newspaper editor once who told me that she would never publish a letter to the editor that was unsigned. If you’re going to express an opinion, have the courtesy and courage to attach your name to it. (Even if it’s a fictional identity, like Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard”.)
4. Do more than just promote yourself. If all you do when you interact with people on social media sites is shill your own content, then you’re not really contributing to the community. For example, if the only contribute I ever made at PAL were to recommend articles here at my SEO blog, no one would visit because no one would like me. In fact, I’d probably get banned in short order. This holds true at every kind of social media site, whether it’s the Wikipedia, Digg, or StumbleUpon.
5. Start with good, unique, useful content on your website. The only thing that works well for promotion in a social media optimization campaign is good content. Don’t bother promoting mediocre content. Michael Martinez mentioned the other day that in any niche, you can probably write content related to news, analysis, or humor. And he mentioned that in any industry, one of those 3 niches is underserved. Figure out which one is underserved in the poker niche and write about that. (I think analysis and humor are both underserved in the poker niche, and poker news is saturated.)
6. Start by optimizing for one social media channel. I see a lot of software and trickery being used to create profiles and links on multiple social media channels. The hoped-for-outcome of these tricks is to create more backlinks to your website. This isn’t an effective strategy. The powerful backlinks that you want to get from social media produce actual visitors to your site. They also provide unsolicited links from bloggers and news sources that hear about your content. So before conquering 20 or 200 social media sites, start with one and get good at it. That means spending time there, sharing information, participating in the community, and making friends there. Which channel you start with is up to you. A lot of my readers already participate in forums, but it’s not a social media optimization strategy until you come up with a plan to use their forum participation to build traffic to their site. Same way for blog commenters. Same way for people who use Digg. Pick on social media channel and spend an hour a day on your strategy there.
7. Don’t be greedy and/or stingy. If you decide that Yahoo! Answers (for example)  is going to be your social media optimization project, then be generous and answer questions even if there’s not an opportunity to drop a link to your content. And when you do drop a link to your content, link to other people’s content too. Remember the sage I wrote about in my poker link building article? “The more he does for others, the more he has.”
8. Network like a fiend. Get to know the other people at your social media site of choice. Communicate with them. Ask them questions if you can, and answer their questions if you can. The more you help them, the more they’ll help you. Add them to your instant messenger list and encourage them to add you in return.

I’m going to cover more specific social media optimization techniques for specific sites and specific types later this week. Some of those topics will include:

• Optimizing for Blog & Microblog Traffic
• Optimizing for Forum & Message Board Traffic
• Optimizing for Social Networking Traffic
• Optimizing for Bookmarking & Tagging Traffic
• Optimizing for Wiki Traffic
• Optimizing for Social News Traffic
• Optimizing for Photo, Video & Audio Sharing Traffic
• Optimizing for Opinion
• Optimizing for Question & Answer Traffic

See also: The Ultimate Guide to Twitter for Poker SEOs

Finally, if you dug this post and want to share it with your social media buddies, I’d appreciate it. Here’s the ShareThis button again:

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 8:29 am and is filed under Social Media . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.