Social Media
Social Media is a great way to give your blog (or website) extra exposure and to drive more visitors to your content. Social Media encompasses Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and to a lesser extent MySpace.
Social media is increasingly being used by people as a means of searching for the information they want.
Facebook is the default social media network used by most of the developed world to communicate with one another.
It is also a fantastic way to connect with people to promote your goods and services.
You should set up a Facebook Page for your Blog, and encourage people to like the page. Each person who likes your page will add not only them as a potential reader, but also put your Facebook page in front of all of ‘their’ friends too.
As your page becomes more popular with more likes, your potential reach will grow into the thousands, then the hundreds of thousands and your traffic to your blog will grow too.
Be sure to share every new post on your blog with your Facebook page otherwise you won’t appear in your friends feeds.
Twitter is a a social media mini blogging site. Think of it as a site for 140 character blog posts.
Forget about telling people what you had for breakfast or what you are watching on TV, instead, target all the people who use Twitter as a source of information.
# Tags are used to search for Tweets about specific stories, news items, subject matter etc.
All you have to do is to write a compelling Tweet, include a #tag related to the subject matter and include a link to your related blog post. Your Tweet will then appear in front of everyone on Twitter who is interested in that topic.
Well…. possibly…..
There are a few hoops that you need to jump through first.
When you search in Twitter using a #tag, the results are split into three groups;
Top / All / People you Follow
You want your Tweets to appear in the ‘TOP’ list because this is the default list and you can’t rely on your potential visitors clicking on the ‘All’ tab to find you. In addition, many people don’t know that they have option as to which list they can view.
The ‘Top’ list contains relevant tewwts from the Twitter accounts with the highest ‘authority’ within Twitter.
This means that you can’t just open an account and start posting tweets with #tags and expect to get lots of traffic.
If you want to start getting lots of targeted traffic, you need to build up your Twitter followers first.
To begin with, use the Twitter search tool to find people in your niche;
https://twitter.com/search-advanced
Once you have found some people who are active in your niche, follow them. A percentage will follow you back.
To begin with you are limited as to how many people you can follow, so build up slowly, whilst publishing tweets on a regular basis.
Once you get over 50 followers it becomes slightly easier, and you can then follow a few hundred at a time more than are following you.
The first aim is to grow your followers to over 1850. Once at this level, you can only follow 10% more people than follow you, so growing your followers becomes a slower process.
Our advice is not to use any software for building your Twitter followers quickly as we have heard tales of Twitter accounts being suspended for such practices.
Once you have over 1850 followers you will stand much more chance of getting your tweets into the ‘Top’ category listings.
The secret is to build your (targeted niche specific) followers and to tweet on a regular basis.
The most time efficient way to send regular tweets is to use Hootsuite to schedule up to 200 tweets at a time.
The only core rule is that each of the 200 tweets must be different, but can link to the same page or pages.
Once you have scheduled some tweets, follow your traffic using Hootsuite and Google Analytics to see which tweets produce the best and worst response in terms of click through rate, but also ‘bounce rate’. You want your visitors to engage with your content, so watch the bounce rate of your visitors from different sources and you will soon see a pattern of targeted traffic v un-targeted traffic.
Read more about Using Twitter for Business
Google+
Google+ is a growing social media competitor to Facebook, mainly because Google are forcing many of their users onto it in exchange for using their services.
Whether it will ever truly rival Facebook as the de facto social media channel in terms of numbers and footfall is debatable, as people don’t need or want two places to get together online.
However, it is easy to share your content publically and if you share enough and join enough groups then you will get traffic from Google+
There are those that describe LinkedIn social media as little more than a glorified job site, and to a certain extent it has evolved into a career networking site of sorts, but it also has the potential to be so much more than that.
If you set up a LinkedIn business page, which you can do for free, then join related groups, and join in the discussions.
You can then post your goods and services out to those groups that you are a member of.
This has massive potential for reaching a huge audience.
It is also important to bear in mind that there are no gate keepers on LinkedIn, no personal assistants refusing to put you through to who you want to speak to, so you can gain direct access to business people.
YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google… which coincidentally owns YouTube!
YouTube social media offers several opportunities for you to find an audience;
- People search within YouTube for information everyday.
- Many YouTube video results appear in Google’s search engine results as well, so you have the chance to appear direct in Google search results with your video content.
There are a few things you need to do to ‘optimize’ your videos;
- Use a keyword rich title
- Use as many keyword rich tags as you can think of
- use a keyword rich description and make use of the space provided
- Add a URL at the beginning of your description through to your related blog content
- Use ‘Annotations’ within your video as they are readable content
Every time you post a new video, share it through your social media channels using the buttons provided, use the embed code to add it to your blog, as well as a ‘videos’ page of your website or blog.
And…..
Link to the YouTube URL from Guest Posts etc as this will help your video’s rankings in search.
Pinterest is a rapidly growing social media network, designed primarily for images.
In marketing circles this has led to the growth of the infographic.
Infographics are graphics created to display information.
The downside of infographics is that it can be expensive to create good ones, and bad ones are well….. just bad.
Pinterest does seem to drive a lot of traffic though, if used correctly. You will just need to invest a little time and money into getting some quality infographics designed first.
MySpace
Myspace has steadily shrunk as a social media site over the past 5 years as Facebook has grown. It is now more of a niche music based social network, used by many aspiring young artists to showcase their talents.
However, it is still a quite powerful social media site to link from, so it is a good idea to post links on MySpace into your blog posts, videos etc
Summary
Social Media is a potentially powerful traffic source for your blog. We recommend using all of the networks at first while you find out what traffic streams work best in your niche.
After a while of analysing your traffic stats, you will be able to see if the traffic from specific social media sources all leaves your site straight away or if it sticks around to read your content.
Because different niches have different demographics of traffic, you will have to trial the different social media yourself in order to be able to measure the specifics.
Related Posts
Using Twitter Effectively
Free Facebook Traffic
How to Use YouTube
Using LinkedIn for Blog Promotion
How to Use Google+ for Promotion your Blog
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