Search Engine Optimization Bible, Second Edition

Chapter 20. Adding Social-Media Optimization

IN THIS CHAPTER

• What is social-media optimization?

• The value of social media

• Social-media strategies

• Measuring social-media optimization

Ask any child over the age of 10 what MySpace is and you'll likely get a pretty good description. During the conversation, you'll also probably hear about other sites such as Flickr, Facebook, ShoutLife, YouTube, Twitter, and Jaiku. These are all examples of the different social networks that have become an Internet phenomenon over the past few years.

Social networks are groups of people who are linked by some type of connection. MySpace is a social network where friends — people who know each other — connect. New friends come into the mix. Friends' friends come into the mix, and eventually you have a network of people (as shown in Figure 20-1) who may not know each other in the real world but are connected via the Internet.

What is phenomenal about this social network is how quickly people have adopted it. Using the connections made available by social networking, the category of social media has grown nearly as quickly.

Social media refers to the content generated by social networking. The publishing mode for social media is many-to-many publishing. What this means is that a group of people publish a work or works that are distributed to another group, or several groups, of people.

Literally defined, social media are the technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, ...