Social media optimization in 2010

With businesses always on the lookout to get an edge on the competition, many firms are taking on board the importance of social media optimization. This has become particularly high on the agenda as social media networking has taken off in recent years, and especially as these were tapped into in a big way during the recent UK elections. Business thinking has had to adapt, and a new survey has discovered that over 60 per cent of businesses are investing in the area of social media as an integral part of their long-term development.

This is particularly the case in the recruitment industry. In addition to being an invaluable research tool, social media is increasingly important when it comes to selecting the best candidates for the job, and retaining quality candidates. To some extent bypassing the usual recruitment channels, social media can be used effectively to highlight knowledge distribution and ensure that posts are advertised in places other than just in the public arena.

Recruiters are also being helped in their ongoing search for the best candidates by social networking groups such as Facebook and Myspace, where a better overall picture of the potential candidate can be built up, and this in conjunction with tools such as psychometric testing is proving effective in targeting the right applicants.

The report emphasizes the importance of social media and online marketing in developing a business with effective long-term strategies and keeping ahead of the increasingly intense competition. It also points out that a common mistake made by HR and recruitment divisions is to assume that new social and professional networking platforms such as Twitter and the rest are necessarily passing fashions, and the importance of information gathering in these areas.

Platforms like LinkedIn may indeed be here today and gone tomorrow, and may well be replaced by others of a similar ilk in a fast-developing technological environment, but they should be assimilated into the business model now rather than left while the competition reaps the benefits of investment in this knowledge-rich environment. Present and future development is put at risk by ignoring the social networking opportunities presently on offer, as they’ll be with us for the foreseeable future even if their particular incarnations are in a constant state of flux.

The increasing importance of social networking sites in the online world can be seen by Facebook’s latest plans to topple Google as the globe’s most popular website. Facebook plans to utilize a raft of new tools to enable users to take their friends with them as they conduct internet searches, with an open graph protocol letting web page publishers tag their content by type, and partnering with other publishers through similar content. The idea is to allow surfers to concentrate on the sorts of things they like on the internet, from clothes and music to photography, and the resulting information from searches being stored by Facebook in the way they store people connections at the moment.