Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Everybody loves the social media site Digg, or they think they do. It happens to be the social news site that everyone wants to get on because of it’s history, possible traffic and exposure that can come from it. However, Digg is not good for a lot of industries. Instead, look for a Pligg site that is a better match for your news.

What’s Pligg? Pligg is an open source social news & voting software. Basically Digg. Anyone can download it for free and install it on their servers. Sites are popping up all over the internet that are like Digg, only targeted to different topics. This means that their users may be a better match for your stories and you may have better success with a Pligg powered site than Digg.

Pligg is powering sites such as:
Sphinn - For SEO
Foxwire - Firefox & Thunderbird news.
Buddhist Events
Hot2Canada - Canadian News
Killer Startups - Covering internet startup companies.
Blogg Buzz - What’s hot on the internet right now.
Design Float - Design tutorials and tricks.
Dealigg - Social Bargain Hunting
Blogs4God - Christian Blogs
Vroomer - Auto News
The Knit Pligg
YardBarker - Sports

You can now add a Sphinn button to your site to let visitors quickly submit your post to Sphinn, the SEO Digg clone from Search Engine Land.

Here is the button:

Feel free to download it and host it yourself. It also does measure up to Danny Sullivan’s button standards.

Wordpress Code:
<a href="http://sphinn.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>"><img src="http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png" border="0" alt="Sphinn" title="Add to Sphinn"></a>

JavaScript Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var URL = window.location.href;
document.write("<a href='http://sphinn.com/submit?url="+URL+"'><img src='http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png' border='0' alt='Sphinn' title='Add to Sphinn'></a>")
</script>

I’ll be working on getting the Sphinn button into the social bookmark tool too in the upcoming week or so.

[tags]sphinn,search-engine-land,social-bookmark,digg[/tags]

FeedBurner is the only service (that I know of) that will re-publish a blogs feed in order to get feed stats. Being such a great service, many users use it only to figure out how many readers their blogs have. However, FeedFlare is a great addition to any FeedBurner feed as it builds interaction and social media links into each post.

FeedFlare allows publishers to easily build “interactivity” into the content they create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others. Publishers can include a variety of services including a live display of the number of comments to each post, the ability to email the author directly and show the number of blogs that link to their item.

To enable FeedFlare, login to your FeedBurner account, go to the Optimize tab then choose FeedFlare from the left column. You can then check items that you want to display in your feed.

I suggest adding at least the following:

• Email This - Send the post via email to a friend or a co-worker.
• Comments Count - You may be able to increase click thoughs if people know there are comments on your post.