Social media
How To Use Social Media Effectively
Filed under: Guest Posts, Social Media, Tools
Social media is now an important and very powerful tool to drive traffic to your website or blog. With a high degree of competition for consumer traffic, it’s very important to understand the role that social media plays in helping develop your website’s profile.
The key is learning the basic tricks to harnessing the power of social media of your advantage. The process can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. Next we provide a number of simple and straightforward ways to properly utilize social media to your websites advantage. As with any process, you’ll learn to optimize your techniques with time and experience.
Sharing Buttons
If you have a blog, you should take advantage of the easy to add sharing buttons available on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Essentially, this allows people who like an article that you have posted to share it with those they are connected with. This is a great way to build back links to your site and drive traffic to a specific article. We have had people actually asking to include a sharing button for certain social networks.
YouTube
Make videos on the subject your business or products you are selling and include links back to your website. Not only is this a fun way to promote your website, but it can really do a lot to motivate people to visit your website. When making a YouTube video make sure to provide some kind of incentive for viewers to make it back to your website. Keep the videos short and to the point, no more than 2 minutes.
Demographics
Social media is going to be more effective for some websites over others. A site based around music reviews is likely to benefit a great deal more from the use of social media than a site about oil tanker construction. This should be reflected in the amount of time you spend developing your website’s social media presence. There are only so many hours in a day and your goal should be maximizing your time to bring in as much traffic as possible. Depending on your website, social media isn’t always going to be the most efficient way to do this.
Document
Make sure you keep track of what effect implementing social media techniques is having on your website. Most website platforms track the number of visits your site is receiving and some even provide advanced traffic metrics. You can also track the effectiveness of your social media efforts by asking customers how they came across your site via questionnaires and surveys. Most people won’t mind filling these out if they’re short and they frequent the site often. Monitoring your results will help you decide whether or not your attempts at utilizing social media are paying dividends.
Check out our posts about measuring socila media:
- Measuring Your Social Media Success with Google Analytics
- HOW-TO: Tag Social Media Links for Google Analytics
- Outbound Links are Gold
This article was contributed by Gerald Day. Gerald helps to run and maintain many different websites. One of them being a website that provides LED TV reviews. He also like to write about how he promotes these websites via Internet marketing tactics in his spare time.
Posted on: July 27, 2011
