Increasing the awareness of a product, brand or event by using a number of social media sites as a prop is the newest marketing strategy in the field of Internet marketing. All this is done to generate publicity with the help of social media outlets and communities. This process is called social media optimization (SMO). SMO can be called as an amalgamation of social news, bookmarking sites, social media sites, videos and blogging sites. Like SEO, the primary goal of SMO is to drive the desired traffic to business websites.

On the basis of the findings of numerous surveys and researches released by ace market research companies, it can be concluded that SMO is vital for businesses of all shapes and types because:

• Social media produces almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail as well as PPC.
• Social media lead conversion rates are 13% higher than the average lead conversion rate.
• Nearly 21% of marketers state that social media has become more important to their company over the past six months.
• Companies that generate more than 1,000 Facebook Likes also receive nearly 1,400 website visits per day.
• On Facebook, brand posts get half of their reach within 30 minutes of being posted.
• Approximately, 43% of all marketers have found a customer via LinkedIn in 2013.
• About 36% of all marketers have found a customer via Twitter in 2013.
• Around 23% of marketers are investing in blogging and social media in 2013.
• About 46% of online users count on social media when making a purchase decision.