The idea of promoting websites through the route of search engine optimization has been around for quite a long time. Webmasters are always seeking novel methods to gain maximum reach on the Web. A powerful method is to identify and target a particular group of users. With users taking active part in contributing the content on the Web rather than remain the passive readers, webmasters are finding the social media sites as a viable option of reaching the larger audience.

Social Media Optimization (SMO), therefore, has become an effective tool of promoting a business, product and service globally. SMO helps you reach a huge number of online visitors who may turn out to be the potential buyers. Webmasters have found that posting ads on social networking sites gets more attention as compared to other user-generated sites.

The primary reason of posting ads on social networking sites is to attract a large amount of online traffic. Social networking sites are the popular platforms bringing people across the world to come together and write, share, contribute, comment and distribute all kind of content over the Internet. The key to gain attention of so large a community lies in posting the creative, interesting and witty content on the social sites thereby to induce the visitor to visit your site.

Some of the platforms of social media are the forums and discussion boards. These are frequented by a large number of people who talk and share views on almost any issue, information, and links. To get started one could start a thread or forum in such community sites and get the people talk about the product or service on offer. If people like your content, they may spread it like a virus and provide valuable links in the process. This is what viral marketing is all about.