How to Leverage Social Media for Traffic and Links
I bet you hear many times every day that Social Media is powerful and you should not miss the opportunity to get into the boat. You read all over how powerful social media is and you already have a profile with lots of friends, a fan page for your website but no one is coming from facebook or twitter back to you. What’s the catch ?
I will tell you the secret behind getting a lot of visitors from social media websites.
The Story.
First of all, you must think about the process of facebook and twitter evolution. There is a secret behind why twitter and facebook had that growth. Their visitors was not brought from google adsense or yahoo advertising. What they’ve done was to tell to people: “Hey, I offer you these nice tool, would you get your friends to my website?”. It was not the message sent, but this was what they wanted to do. Prople started to try facebook, and they liked the features they brought their friends there. And then businesses and influential people liked the features and they brought their fans and customers to facebook and twitter.
This is where all the people on facebook comes from: people with lot of influence considered that it is the place where they can improve the relationship with their fans and they brought them there. They posted a message on the top of their blogs, websites and other mediums that they’ve used before: “Like my articles ? Connect with me on facebook so i can keep you updated”. After they moved their fans to facebook other people joined too: “Hey, this is pretty popular, maybe he has something to say”.
To go back where I started from, the people who get traffic and links from facebook and twitter worked to build their profile, they first moved their actual friends and fans to facebook and then others joined. Firstly they have a medium where to keep fans connected and secondly they attract more fans directly from facebook because they are popular.
What you have to do:
Bring your actual fans and visitors to your social media accounts.
Make it clear for everyone that you have a facebook page and what they can see there. “Stay updated with great posts: Connect on Facebook/Follow me on Twitter”. If they like your posts they will like your facebook page and they will follow your twitter profile.
Once you got a decent number of fans it will be easy for you to get others, post regularly updates, not to often too be considered spam but not to rarely to forget you. You updates will be retweeted and re-shared, in this way you can get more fans from facebook that will turn out in visitors for your website.
Invest time in your facebook and twitter profile and share other news or articles too, if they see that you share quality links they will like you more and they will become loyal.
If you provide good updates to them more fans will come from retweets and shares on facebook.
The beginning is the hardest. If you just started your website and you don’t have who to bring to your facebook and twitter profile then you can’t make so fast a good profile. You can’t have people becoming fans from spamming and providing no content. Focus on writing quality content and to get some traffic to your website from other ways, or get all your friends to subscribe and ask them to share and retweet, this helps a lot.
I will share you two small tricks that can help you started. First is simple: buy facebook ads. Buy traffic from facebook and direct it to your facebook fan page. You can get clicks for as low as 0.05, and 50% of the people who click will become a fan to your page. Well, this means that for 0.10$ you have a new fan. For 10$ you can have 100 facebook fans. It is so hard to invest 10$ into your website to get it started ? What about if you make an investment of 100$. This will bring 1000 new fans to your page and about same number of visitors to your website only in the day you run the ads, but all that fans will stay connected to you and they will click again tomorrow, they will share and like your stories. Where you can get so many visitors so cheap ?
Buy friends and fans
The second advice I ca give you is to have someone tweet or write something on his wall about your facebook page or twitter profile. To achieve this is harder because you need to get this from a popular person to make an impact. Since it will not happen only if you poke him and ask to write about your profile, but you can look if they are willing to take some money to do this. Something like this will make it: “I recommend you to follow this profile”, or “If you don’t already you must follow this profile”. Probably he won’t mind to have some money to post a message about you. What is the return ? Thousands of people will come to your profile, will visit your site, will follow and like you.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission
December 13th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
I really don’t think that buying fans will get you anywhere. You should grow naturally and that’s a rule
December 14th, 2010 at 8:28 am
I’m not saying to buy fans, in the strategy explained above I say to drive people to your website ( trough advertising too ) that have a lot of chance of being fans. They are very targeted and they press the button for themselves, meanwhile they are not paid any penny to do that.