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.

Believe it or not, social media just may be what elects our next president into office. From Obama’s Girl to Giuliani’s Girl and now Hillary’s Girl, YouTube and other social media outlets will have a much larger impact on the younger voters than anything else.

Lets face it, watching a presidential debate is not high on many people’s list. It may have worked back in the day, but now more and more people are turning to the Internet for news and filtering out what they don’t want. Included in the filtering process will more than likely be campaign speeches, debates and candidates views. Instead, much of America will wait until someone spins it on MySpace, Facebook or YouTube before they really start paying attention. They won’t stop to fact check, they’ll just believe in it. That’s the way social media works though, if your friends say it’s true, it must be.