Muhammed Saleem, social media consultant at ACS, discussed the effectiveness that a Social Media Optimization strategy can have on growing your company. Social media campaigns such as blogs, microblogs, social news sites, and social networks can be low cost, high impact strategies for startups to drive additional traffic to their site and build a highly targeted audience. In his presentation, Muhummed outlined nine fundamentals of Social Media Optimization:

1. Understand your audience and figure out a strategy to bring them to your site.
2. Attract attention by being original.
3. Be link-worthy—Use interesting content to draw attention, and increase visibility.
4. Make tagging, bookmarking and sharing easy.
5. Help your content travel through RSS, email subscriptions, newsletters, embeds, mash-ups, and e-books.
6. Reward and thank helpful and valuable users, linkers, and traffic sources.
7. Be real & genuine—use “white hat” techniques to encourage positive PR.
8. Participate
9. Develop and stick to a SMO strategy and use tactics wisely.

For more information on SMO fundamentals and techniques, watch the video of Muhammed’s presentation below:

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