Interchanges.com says the growth of social media networks is amazing. Big names like Twitter, Facebook, My Space and Linked In dominate the press and seem to be the top options for a business or person looking to network online. In reality there are hundreds of quality social networks that provide tools and benefits that meet or exceed these big names. Many less known social networks actually rank better on search engines due to their design and content. Sorting through the hundreds of quality networks and creating profiles can take months. Optimizing your profiles, website, or blogs for social networks is called SMO or Social Media Optimization.

Interchanges.com believes SMO is not a paradigm shift away from the Search Engine Optimization process, but rather a method making a site more easily linked to, increasing it’s visibility in social media searches on custom search engines, and more commonly included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. A basic SMO approach is to add buttons to bookmark pages at ‘del.icio.us’ or ‘furl’, to ‘digg this article’, to share on ‘Facebook’, etc.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Users, unlike web crawlers, can be easily put off with shameless self promotion. So finding the right balance when it comes to adding links is essential to building brand recognition and improving overall site visibility. SMO can be considered an advanced form of word to word and viral marketing using social networks. SMO is tricky because there is no general course of action, since current trends and fads, new concepts as well as user’s fickleness factors into the process. Interchanges.com branding processes includes SMO as a key component.