How much does Google value the links within social media conversations? How many visitors do these drive to your website? If these questions would require a complete book to be answered, it is arguable that marketing your website content via Twitter and Facebook has played an important part in uplifting ranking for related keywords and generate traffic. Last week I have conducted a small experiment in order to generate traffic and back links to one of my blog posts.
These are some suggestions to generate traffic via social media, but firstly be sure that the page in question contains the whole set of social buttons because you want users to share your content.
Your Followers
In order to get your message distributed be careful on how you tweet and the interests of your niche/followers. For example if they are interested in nature and you promote technology gadgets you need to build up new followers in your niche. Therefore you would be better to start following experts of the field and engage them.
Your message
In terms of the message, this can be about your new blog post, an event, a product etc. and must include a shorten link (check bit.ly for this service) to your external resource. Your aim is that people will retweet your message so be careful at the copy, the time when you tweet and the hash tags. Dan Zarrella has written a white paper called “The art of ReTweets” that contain a semantic analysis of the most successful words in terms of viral distribution. A quick read of this document will help you crafting a great tweet.
In terms of time, you should map where your followers are located and tweet at the best time for every country. In the case study, there was 70% from UK and just 20% from U.S.A so just these two countries have been targeted.
In terms of hash tags perform a research in your field and stick on 1-2 of them in the tweet. Many people create newspaper with services like Paper.li including articles and news from hash tag terms donating you precious backlinks.
Go Viral
After that, look at your followers and ask some of them to retweet you. First you should check if they are interested in your topic, spread one of their messages and ask for a retweet (commonly called RT). If you are looking to outreach bloggers and influencers look at the users engaged in the conversations in your field and interact with them through the mention function(example:Hey @carlopandian, could you RT this – How to generate traffic through social media bit.ly/rIVg2P). With your words you can actually transform them into ambassadors of your resource getting them to tweet about your content.
This process can be performed also via Facebook Fan pages and Groups that allows comments and are related to your niche. Remeber to be contextual to your topic and don’t be invasive.
In conclusion, social media can be a great vehicle to drive traffic and increase likes to your website, it is a great area where you have to find best practices looking at your messages and Google Analytics data (traffic sources from social media).
Written by Carlo Pandian
Carlo Pandian is SEO account executive for Tug Search
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