If you notice, you’ll see each blog-post here has options for viewers to tell others about it if they wish to. How can they do that? It’s rather simple. The series of icons at the bottom of every post and the 2 links right below each post’s heading at the top are in fact gateways to larger sharing of contents on the Internet. A new term given to this is social networking on the web.
Members from anywhere across the globe – unknown to one another in most cases – can be part of a social network, who are likely, but not necessarily, to share a common idea or theme among themselves. Let’s take DIGG for example.
Founded by Kevin Rose in 2003, DIGG came into shape when Rose hired Owen Byrne, a skilled programmer after listing his project idea in Elance. Today DIGG is a popular social network site, whereby once you become its member, you can ‘digg’ a story (meaning you like it) or ‘bury’ one after it’s listed (if you do not like it).
It has been seen that after a story is ‘dugg’ (that is, listed on DIGG), it may turn out highly popular within a very short time, which can lead to sudden surge in traffic to your website. This new phenomenon has given birth to yet another way of optimizing websites, called Social Media Optimization (SMO), for driving targeted traffic from sources other than search engines (see this story, Introduction to Social Media Optimization).
Reports say that almost 94% of DIGG users are male, of whom 88% are 18-39 years old and 52% are related to IT (see this story, Is Social Bookmarking the Next Big Thing?). Perhaps other social networking sites like Yahoo!’s del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo! a year back) also have similar story to tell.
In spite of this skewed user profile, such is the hullabaloo over social networking that many websites now consider SMO a must-do in the lines of SEO, link building, press release, etc. in order to be a step ahead of competition with regard to generating organic search traffic.
Is SMO the next magic door to the pot of gold called ‘traffic’? The jury is out on this, and the verdict is still a long long way off. Any comment?
Related reading: Have you socialized today?
Technorati Tags: digg, networking, social networking, social media optimization, smo, seo, traffic, search
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