For a number of years, many digital marketing campaigns have been focussing heavily on SEO (search engine optimisation). Searches have been (and are likely to continue to be for some time yet) the main way to drive traffic to your website. Now the new kid on the block, social media, is starting to drive traffic. Therefore should we be treating it the same as SEO by using SGO (social graph optimisation)?

What is a social graph?

A social graph is an online representation of our social relationships (business and personal) on social media platforms.

Here is a very simple example of a social media graph and what happens when you establish and use a SGO strategy to expand it.
For the following example we will assume your hotel is connected to one customer on one social media platform. That customer has 3 ‘friends’ on that particular social media platform.
Therefore you are connecting directly with your customer, and indirectly with their ‘friends’.

If you can manage to get your customer to share your content with their ‘friends’, these ‘friends’ may then become interested in your hotel and form a direct connection with you, perhaps even becoming a customer themselves.
You are then connecting directly with 4 customers and indirectly with a further 9.

You can see how this kind of effect can snowball.

Under the same assumptions, if you were connected to 60 customers and they each had 3 friends, you are then indirectly connected to 180 potential customers.

In actual fact, the number of indirect connections will be MUCH higher, as people are highly likely to have more than 3 ‘friends’ on any particular social network.
Even a low figure of 30 ‘friends’ means the same 60 customers would be delivering 1,800 indirect connections.

Further to this, if your connections are also connected to each other, this amplifies the communication of your product creating a kind of communication loop, making your product a common factor between your customers.

So how do you optimise your social graph?

The key to expending your social graph is encouraging your customers to share your content with their ‘friends’.

Here are a few tips on how to do this:

- You should study your existing customers more than your potential customers in order to figure out what is likely to get them to share your content.

- As a general rule, if you do something well, it will get shared. For example, give someone a great package and provide them with a great experience and they are likely to recommend it to their ‘friends’.
Traditionally, this would have been done through word of mouth. Now though, social media is becoming the main tool for such recommendations.

- Also to maximise the sharing trend, there are some techie bits and bobs you can use to make sharing your content as easy as possible. If you force your customers to do the dirty work, they may not bother. Provide them with the option of the simple click of a button and the chance of sharing will dramatically increase.

- The old saying “a picture tells a thousand words” certainly rings true in the social networking world. People are very comfortable sharing photos and videos as these tend to be much more expressive than plain text. Use this to your advantage by making it as easy as possible for people to share their pictures and videos with you and also as easy as possible to share your pictures and videos with their friends.

- Don’t panic if you lose ‘friends’ or ‘followers’. This is actually a form of optimisation. These people weren’t listening to your content anyway. Having said this, if you suffer a dramatic loss in your audience there’s clearly something wrong!

SGO is a new direction for online marketing and is therefore most definately open for debate. Do you see SGO overtaking SEO as the most important digital marketing strategy?