Making Money With Social Media - Top Tips

Using social media to promote your online business has become a necessity if you are going to succeed in the Web 2.0 marketplace. Social media has become of the tool of choice by many online business owners for getting their brand established and spreading the word about their online business. Because of this, social media marketing has changed the organic search process and search engines are now starting to index the content that you create on social media sites.

With that said it has become necessary to use social media optimization to drive targeted traffic to your website just like you apply search engine optimization techniques to get your website ranked high in the search engine results.

Understanding Social Media Optimization

When you create a social media marketing campaign you should choose a few different social media tools and then develop strategies for each tool you have chosen. For example, if you have chosen to use Twitter, YouTube, and Digg as tools for your social media marketing campaign, you will develop a specific strategy for each one.

Each strategy you develop must be optimized for the search engines since Twitter content, YouTube videos, and social bookmarking is all recognized by the search engines for indexing.

How to Optimize a Social Media Marketing Campaign

Let's the use the above scenario as an example. If you are using Twitter, YouTube, and Digg as your social media marketing tools of choice, when you create a strategy for each one here are some tips on how to use social media optimization for each component of your social media marketing campaign.

Twitter: If you have used the search engines lately you will find that there is a lot of substance behind 140 character messages. The information you offer on Twitter that is related to your business will be indexed with the search engines. When you plan your strategy with Twitter all of the content you write in your tweets should be optimized for the search engines. When you write content it should include some of the keywords that your prospects use in their searches.

This is not to say you should stuff your tweets full of keywords because that is a "no-no" and will hurt your credibility as a professional. Instead, you should integrate the keywords naturally in your tweets and offer high quality information that is useful to your target audience.

YouTube: You have probably noticed that different videos appear in the search engine results when you conduct a search. If you use a site like YouTube to create educational videos related to your online business, you should optimize the videos for the search engines.

To optimize the videos for the search engines you should name your video files with keywords that your target audience uses and include keywords in the links to your video. Also, place keywords strategically in the content on the web page that contains the video and add keywords to the video title tag and description. If the video is on your website, then create a separate sitemap especially for videos so the search engine spider can easily locate them.

Digg: If social bookmarking is one of your strategies for social media marketing then make all of the content you create on the social bookmarking site keyword rich so your prospects can easily find your content. Any links that you place on the site should also contain keywords just like your domain name.

Based on these examples you can see how social media optimization is important for driving highly targeted traffic to your website. Social media marketing is on the rise and with more of your prospects using mobile devices this makes social media optimization even more important for promoting your online business.