Social Media Strategies for Building Website Traffic

Ways to Drive Traffic

There are lots of ways to drive traffic to your website — and traffic translates into social media marketing success.  Here’s an overview of methods for creating social media marketing success.

Today, we’ll just talk about 1 element of this — using social media to drive traffic.

Building Traffic with Social Media

First, let’s take a look at different social platforms and talk about how you can use each one to build traffic to your blog.

Facebook - the largest of all social media platforms with over 600 Million users.  Facebook connects “friends” who share information by posting to their wall.  Companies can set up fan pages to share information (companies can’t have individual pages, called profile pages).  Companies can also set up groups.  You can go here for a better understanding of how to use Facebook groups and fanpages for building traffic to your blog.

From a business perspective, you can get users to “Like” you  — become a fan of your company — or join your group.  Then, everything you post might show up on their wall to view and share with their friends.  I say might show up because Facebook decides you’ll be bored if you see everything your friends and companies you like post, so it only shows you some — those who do a good job of engaging users.  So, a key element in any social media strategy is building engagement.

Twitter – the second largest social platform is a micro blogging site with a 140 character limit.  Its main value is the public nature of tweets and their searchability via # (hashtags).  Basically users Tweet news, information, pictures, links … to their followers.  Once a user has a large number of people they follow, the twitter stream (flow of tweets) is so fast users can’t possibly read everything.  Users create lists to manage the flow and may only read tweets from users and certain lists.

When users find something interesting or valuable, they can Retweet it to their followers.  Thus, messages sent through Twitter can spread pretty far, pretty fast — Just ask Anthony Weiner.  This is called viral marketing and can happen anywhere, but is likely on open networks like Twitter and YouTube.

The business strategy for building traffic to your blog using Twitter is to both gather a large number of followers (preferably in your target market), tweet interesting things they want to share, and engaging them to follow your links, etc.

Not all Twitter users are created equal and Klout is a mean for identifying influential Tweeters.  You can cultivate relationships with these influential tweeters to build traffic to your blog.  Sometimes businesses offer free product, free meals, or other incentives to influential tweeters in the hope they will review the product, restaurant, etc.

YouTube and Flickr - these are video-based and image-based social platforms (respectively).  Much like Twitter, these sites are open meaning anyone can see everything others have posted (a small number of videos and images are only distributed to select users).  As with Twitter, there is the potential for videos and images to go viral — and spread far quickly.

OK, enough for today.  I’ll post more about using social media to build traffic to your blog in future posts and I’ll flesh out other elements in my diagram.