Using Social Media to Increase Traffic on Your Website

 

 

Over the course of the past two years, social media sites have become increasingly popular and powerful. A comScore study in 2007 recorded an amazing 774 percent increase of visitors to social media sites between 2006 and 2007. It will be interesting to see how large the increase will be between 2007 and 2008. My guess is that it will reflect another massive increase. So, with the astonishing amount of people visiting and using social media sites, how do you harness a portion of that traffic and direct it to your website? What are the best ways to use social media sites to your advantage and increase visitors to your own site?

• Invest the time necessary to learn about how sites like LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, FaceBook, and other popular sites function so that you can understand how to best use them to benefit your company. Many of these sites have tutorials that will show you how to use and work with their site. These tutorials are very helpful to gain an understanding of each site’s idiosyncrasies. Another great plan is to take advantage of free online courses such as the one Dell has right now entitled, “Using Facebook and Social Networks to Promote Your Business.” Their course is divided up into three segments:
   
  • Lesson 1: Basics of Business Promotion and Relationship-Building on Social Networks
  • Lesson 2: Using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Other Major Social Networks
  • Lesson 3: Examples of Effective Business Promotion on Social Networks

Using a free resource such as this one is a great idea since the only expense involved is the commitment of your time to complete it. While you may choose not to follow every one of their suggestions, it will still generate good ideas for you on how to take advantage of these sites in an effective way for your website.

• Start a blog for your business. Technorati reported that over 97 million blogs were being published as of mid-2007. A blog is a great place to feature products, ask customers for feedback, and bounce ideas around with readers. Blogs are an excellent way of ‘personalizing’ the image of your main website. Customers and readers want to have the ability to interact with you and other readers/visitors. Giving them that ability in a blog associated with your business is an excellent choice. Just make sure that you are consistent in posting new content and responding to comments. Blog articles and posts also give you good content to submit to various sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. If you are concerned about the value or cost of blogging for your company, I would encourage you to read this blog article. When you are finished reading the article, scroll down and read through the comments. These comments are from business owners and reflect their experience blogging. I think you’ll find it encouraging and insightful. If you decide to create a blog, make sure you to look at ways of promoting your blog too. A site such as BlogCatalog is a great place to start. BlogCatalog is a great, free platform for promoting your blog and learning additional ways to increase readership on your blog.
   
• Create a video and use the Internet to create a viral video campaign. Online videos are extremely popular. If you are a manufacturer, create a short video showcasing your company’s manufacturing abilities. If you are a retailer, create a video showcasing various products and their uses. Creating videos is not an expensive ordeal. Create a video two to three minutes in length that dramatizes or explains your online site, your market niche, and yourself. Then upload the video to YouTube, MSN, or other video communities. Don’t forget to link to the video from your blog and your main website. You can also embed the video into a blog post or onto one of the pages of your site. Again, videos can be submitted to various sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon which, if they are well liked, can result in lots of new visitors to your site which, in turn, hopefully translates into new customers.
   
• Get involved in forum discussions. Forums exist for virtually any topic you can think of nowadays. Find one or two that are of interest to you. Some of the most popular forums deal with sports, video games, religion, politics, automobiles, and fashion. Find a forum that appeals to you or is directly related to your business and start participating in discussions. This will give you the ability to network with people who share similar interests to you. It will also give you opportunities to present people with information about yourself, your company, products, etc. People are always more likely to visit your website or learn about your products and services when they have had a chance to interact with you on some level. If forums are new to you, I would encourage you to visit Wikipedia’s section on Forums to learn how they work and understand the ‘netiquette’ that surrounds their usage.

These are just a few of the major ways to use social media websites to your advantage. The other thing to keep in mind is that all of these individual suggestions cross paths with each other. For example, in a forum discussion, when appropriate, you might have the opportunity to direct people to a certain page in your blog where you talk about the topic at hand. Or, in your blog, you may be able to reference a discussion you had while in the forum. In your blog, you can reference products from your main site, or send people to a certain page on your main site to read about a process, technique, or other information. The beauty of using social media is that it is capable of intertwining. In doing this, you can potentially create more inbound links to your main site, create interest by readers and friends that you make while using social sites, and in turn, generate higher amounts of visitors to your main site.

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