"Social Media Marketing" and " Social Media Optimization" are two new words that have been recently added to the marketers’ lexicon, gaining the spotlight since the advent and proliferation of various social networking sites. Just because these words are now common marketing terms, it does not mean that everyone understands the absolute difference between the both of these. Here is my attempt to explain and differentiate the two.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a process of optimizing a website so that the website's alerts and content are spread in social media networks and online communities by visitors of the website. All changes done "on-page" such as improving the design and usability of the website so that it becomes more convincing to users, in an effort to help them spread it through social media sites constitute activities that help in social media optimization. Quick example of SMO is symbolized by all the "digg this" and "stumble this" links that you can see on all over the web.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a much more advance technique for spreading content and links in Social Media by some form of viral marketing. This can be anything from creating convincing content that gets bookmarked and even hits digg's homepage. All these things are done off-site. For example, some companies participate in online communities and Social Networks where their customers interact and their interaction with the customers on these social sites that falls under Social Media Marketing.
So in other words; with SMM you are pushing your message "OUT" and in SMO you are pulling people "IN".
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