Social media has become the new buzzword of the web. As businesses wake up to realise the power of social media and the way it can accelerate the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) process, more and more companies are venturing towards Social Media Optimisation (SMO).

Here are some tips to optimise your social media profile so that you get effective results:

• Increase your linkability: add a blog, create white papers, aggregate content via ping.fm.
• Make it easy: make tagging and bookmarking simple on your website.
• Reward inbound links: include permalinks, list recent linking blogs, promote linkers with a nofollow tag.
• Help content travel: PDFs, video files, podcasts, slideshows, articles.
• Encourage mash-ups: open your API; permit embeds; permit RSS.
• Add value: be a resource, even if it doesn’t seem like it will help you — provide freemium content.
• Reward helpfulness: notes of thanks, discounts, badges.
• Participation: create awareness, prolong buzz around your website.
• Know your audience: research, community mapping, targeting, metrics.
• Create content: videos, articles, podcasts, widgets, images, slides, plugins.
• Don’t forget your roots: be humble.
• Don’t be afraid to try new things: stay fresh, reinvent the wheel daily.
• Develop a social media optimisation strategy: define objectives, set goals, have a desired channel or channels, track reputation, find influence, create credibility, be a trailblazer.

(via .net magazine, December 2009.)

Ultimately, the important thing is to first research how to optimise each of your social networks. You have to find a niche and decide what content and keywords you would like to optimise against. Although some of your social networking profiles and information can be found in general search engines, you are ultimately optimising to be found within that particular social network’s search engine.

Twitter, for example, until recently did not provide access to its data firehose, therefore, search engines such as Google and Bing were shut out. This has since changed, but until sites such as Twitter and Facebook fully open up to organisations and developers alike, optimising for each site is a necessity.