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Setting the Foundation for Building Community
Social media optimization (SMO) is a programmatic strategy for building and engaging community. By following this series of interrelated principles for creating and sharing content through social networks, the library can become an active voice in a thriving community. With SMO, your library's unique personality emerges on social networks, thereby activating a rich multitude of community interactions.
SMO fundamentally offers a framework for connecting with people. SMO benefits your library and your community of users by establishing a plan for creating and sharing relevant and meaningful content. The primary goal of SMO for libraries is to encourage social media engagement and content sharing through the major social networks that constitute our users' learning and research environments. The primary outcome of SMO is an engaged community of library users. An engaged community can then generate many secondary effects, including increased Web traffic to library pages and increased library resources usage, as well as establishing and reinforcing the library as a trusted member of the community.
As an overall concept overview, it will be helpful to outline what SMO is and what SMO is not. Content is a key element of SMO. Content can include resources shared through the Web and through social networks, whether in a URL, a hashtag, a geolocation, an image, or the text of a social network post itself. While content is a central element of this strategy, SMO is more than just content, and more than marketing the library. While those aspects are well represented within SMO, the underlying focus is grounded in a sense of community. In this way, SMO is not just about the library pushing out content, but about being active on social networks to the benefit of your community. SMO offers a wide-reaching and flexible structure for connecting with users, listening to the community, and building relationships. SMO encourages the library to develop and demonstrate a genuine interest in the community for the benefit of both the library and the library's users.
This issue of Library Technology Reports is intended for beginning and intermediate social media practitioners who wish to implement an effective method for sharing content and building community. Our discussion primarily centers around the social networks of Facebook, Twitter,...