Things to consider while hiring social media experts

Social media marketing has become the buzzword in the marketing scene with its potential to boost the brand image, sales and profitability of any organization or business enterprise. Many a Social media optimization package and social media marketing package are offered by online marketing firms, today. With the growing number of social media experts around, you must analyze a few critical factors before availing the services of social media experts like,

Experience

Social media marketing experts with experience can help you to deal with any kind of situation with their time tested strategies.

Expertise

A look at the portfolio of the social media marketing agencies can help you to understand their proficiency in the field. Check out their accounts in Twitter, Myspace or Facebook, their following and search engine rankings to analyze their popularity before selecting them.

Effectiveness

Hire the services of the experts who have a great track record, history of prompt delivery and coveted clientele.

Social Media Optimization – The Concept Behind It

Social media refers to interaction between humans via Internet (mostly, like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube) and through mobiles for discussion and sharing information. Some examples include:

o Social Networking like Facebook, Orkut
o Blogs like Word press, Vox
o Internet forum like V bulletin
o Video Sharing like YouTube

The concept behind Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is fairly simple. Here changes are implemented to a site so that it is more visible in search engines (such as Google, Yahoo) and also frequently used in blogs. This in turn increases the traffic and gives good return in your business.

Why do we think of Social Media Optimization (SMO)? Because it is where the visitors come from and returning visitors gets converted to customers. Therefore it increases your business. SMO creates a open line of communication between you and your customers, clients. You can directly interact with people buying or using the products and clear your views. So there are a few steps for generating publicity through Internet. These steps include – blogging, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and using third party images, videos etc. Sometimes viral marketing is used, i.e., use of pre-existing social networking services to popularize the product, where videos and articles promoting our products are put on sites which deal with similar issues and things. It may use software, flash games and text messages for promotions. Online calendars can also be used to display and bookmark the dates if we are trying to publicize some event.

If you think of a site, to increase the visibility of the site, you (as service provider) can increase search tags, adding content more related to the site so that the site is searched more. Another option can be updating the site regularly and making other site users to tag your site regularly. This increases the hit ratio and so there will be increase of potential customers.

Some 93% of the teen use internet. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64% of the teens aged 12-17 years participate in content writing.

o 33% of online teens create or work on webpage.
o 28% of online teens have created their online journal.
o 27% of online teens works on their own webpage.
o 57% of online teens have watched videos from YouTube.
o 55% of online teens have profile on a social network like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut.

Social Media Optimization Services includes:

o Social Bookmarking(similar to bookmarking you site to “favorites” in your browser) through high quality bookmarking sites like Google, Yahoo, Digg, My Space. When you bookmark a page you are more likely to come again. A social Bookmarking service allows your book mark for public access and thus it help to other internet users looking for similar thing.
o Writing and/or participating in Blogs in quality blogging sites like Blogger.com.
o Creating Social Media profiles (Facebook, Google).
o Article Submission.