by Edward Sussman
Co-founder and CEO, Buzzr.com

Most everyone knows that Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites can help create a large and loyal following for your organization. If you have something interesting or useful to say (usually in 140 characters or less!), or can spark online conversations, than you have what it takes to find social media followers. There are almost a billion of them out there. For many websites, social publishing, also known as social media optimzation (SMO) of a website is a bigger a traffic driver as SEO (search engine optimization) or SEM (search engine marketing.)

After all, people can “retweet” to their friends and followers with a click, spreading your message --- and hopefully a link back to your website – to tens of thousands of people. That’s why social media is powerful: it makes word of mouth marketing amazingly easy.

Social media doesn’t work in a void, though. If you ultimately want to turn a social media “follower” into your customer, client or member, you’ll need your website to be tightly integrated into your social media efforts. Your website and your social stream are like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that need to be put together to create a full picture. That's where social publishing comes in.

A solid website is the hub around which you should organize all your social media efforts. Your social media presence is an abbreviation of your identity. It allows you to push out that identity in small bits to a broader audience than might otherwise know about you. People can get a sense of what you’re up to without needing to visit your website every day. And when you capture their attention with something especially interesting, if you’ve set up your website correctly, they’ll be able to click through to your site to learn more.

The practice of juicing up a website to leverage social media is known as Social Media Optimization. (Buzzr.com is the only website platform designed specifically to be a great for SMO.) What follows is a detailed examination of best website practices for SMO – and as with anything that’s new, there’s a bunch of jargony language. To sum it up: you want your website to be rich with content and visitor activity, so you’ll have lots to share with the social media services. That's called social publishing. And your website should make it easy to share with social media services using automated tools. That's called social sharing.

The Basics

There are four essential features required for great Social Media Optimization.

1) Easy publishing tools to post new content, such as blogs, image galleries, articles and new product and service offering forms. If you’re in business or helping to run an organization, you have expertise and information you can share. It could be a photo of your new office. It could be a description of a newly service offering. That’s the first step of SMO. Publish, Publish. Publish. (Whether it’s a special on your restaurant’s menu, or a new event being hosted at your church, Buzzr has the most flexible do-it-yourself publishing tools) available.

2) Easy social contribution tools for website visitors/members to create content for you, such as blog comments, star ratings, and discussion forums, all associated with dynamically updating member profiles. While not every website likes to give their visitors tools to participate, the more open you let your site become, the more opportunities there are for sharing “user generated content” to external social media. (On Buzzr, it’s up to you how much to let site visitors participate. Social contribution features can be turned on and off by checking a box.)

3) Unique content URLs A database to assign every piece of new content its own page URL and perma-link that can easily be shared on social media via automatic creation of URL shorteners. Perma-links are essential to creating effective “status updates” on Twitter and Facebook. You don’t want to just drive your social media followers to the homepage of a static website brochure. You want new pages to be published dynamicaly and for your website to automatically assigned unique identifiers to these pages. (Buzzr-made sites automatically create a new “node” for every new piece of content tied to a perma-link with its own URL. Even better, if you turn on our Auto-Tweet feature, every URL you create is automatically shortened so it takes up less space on your 140-character tweets. (e.g. bit.ly/6OEaOB instead of blog.buzzr.com/blogmoo/guess-whos-buzzed))

4) Share A variety of tools to share content, including perma-links, across multiple channels, especially Twitter and Facebook. Features might include “Share This” or “Like” buttons available to site visitors; activity streams that capture what’s happening on your site and can be pushed to outside social streams; widgets to capture your social media activity and bring it back to your own site for your website visitors to discover and follow.)

(Buzzr Autotweet is a unique feature created by Buzzr to supplement your Twitter stream with automatic updates from your site, complete with perma-links. For example, if you post to your blog, your auto-tweet might read: “New post: “Guess Who’s Buzzed!” bit.ly/6OEaOB .)

You’ll also want to prominently display your Twitter stream on your website, as well as activity widgets from any other social media services you participate in. The site should have prominent links to follow the stream. You want to make it easy for your existing audience to follow you on the social stream, too.

(Buzzr has a Twitter display widget that takes just moments to turn on. No need to code – all you need to know is the name of your Twitter account. Buzzr also has a YouTube widget that requires a simple link to display any YouTube video. For those who know how to create good videos, posting your own videos on YouTube, with links back to your site, is another great tactic for drawing in a broader audience. For more advanced users, we have a widget that lets you paste in code from virtually any social service with an open API.)

Finally, you’re going to want to track what’s happening. The time you spend on SMO is an investment. You need to know if it’s paying off. The best indicator of this is whether you are getting good click through rates to your permalinks. So, you’ll need tools that break down what pages of your site are getting the most traffic and then connect the dots. Are those the pages of the site you’ve been promoting on Twitter or Facebook? (Buzzr give you traffic stats that show you what pages are getting traffic and where that traffic is originating from. Buzzr professional services team can also set up an advanced analytics tool for you that tracks the distribution of your tweets.)

For expert SMO help, consider signing up for a professional professional service package. We can offer our service for a small fraction of what digital media agency charges for advice because the Buzzr.com platform makes SMO so easy.

( Ed Sussman is the co-founder and CEO of Buzzr.com and the former president of Mansueto Digital, where he ran Inc.com and FastCompany.com. He is the former executive editor of Inc. magazine.)