In the previous post, we discussed about the importance of social media marketing or social media optimization. It is not enough to understand the importance of social media marketing or social media optimization but is very crucial that you start benefiting from this strategy. Though many webmasters and website owners make several social media marketing efforts not all of them experience the same level of success or benefits. Before you start making your SMO or SMM efforts, you should make adequate preparations in other words you should set the platform correctly so that your efforts will start producing the required results.

Here are few basic preparations that you should make before you start with your efforts. First, try to understand the nature of your target audience. Only when you understand your audience or target customers you will know where to find them. In other words, you should first find out where your customers spend most of their time online. Do they spend a lot of time in Facebook and Twitter or do they spend their time in YouTube or other video sharing sites watching online videos? This information is vital because when you have this information you will know where all your energy should be diverted. Though you should market your brand in all the popular social media platforms, identifying the most favorite social media platforms of your target audience will help you put in more efforts in marketing your brand in those platforms to obtain quicker results.

Secondly, you should spend time learning about the dos and don’ts of each social media platform. Learn the best practices of Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, YouTube marketing and other popular platforms. You should decide not to use any shortcuts or manipulative techniques. Though shortcuts can give you temporary success, on the long run it will ruin your website’s reputation. This also means that you understand how to stay away from spamming the web. Many people fail to pay attention to this factor and end up spamming the web because they have not learnt the basics of social media marketing. You should understand that social media marketing is not about posting just marketing messages on the web. SMM or SMO is more about sharing useful content on the web, which will divert a considerable amount of traffic to your website.

Thirdly, you should spend time in finding social media sites that use ‘do follow’ attribute so that you will also get the link benefit out of your efforts. This does not mean that you should never make use of any social media site that uses ‘no follow’ attribute. You can use a mixture of ‘do follow’ platforms and ‘no follow’ platforms so that your marketing efforts look natural.

Identify the best keywords for your website and create a good number of hypertext variations so that not all the links have the same linking text, which Google deters. These are few important factors that will help you get better results from your social media marketing efforts. Setting the right platform is certainly vital to achieve sustained positive results for your SMO efforts.