Social Media Traffic

kpraveenkumars — Mon, 05 May 2008 05:35:57 +0000

How to get traffic from Social Media sites

Remember yourself in school, in school, there are various sections/classes for the same batch and each section/class had set of students. Now think of how popular you were among your entire batch students. How many of them knew your name, how many of them were your friends.

Now the question is suppose you join a school today, how long do you think it takes to become popular among your batchmates. What would you do to become popular among batchmates?

If you have answers to these questions, you have answers to promotion on social media network site.

Almost all businesses are looking to promote their business online. All of them are looking to tap the potential of traffic present on the social media sites. However most of them do not have clear strategy or method to proceed.

This method of marketing on social networks is essentially a form of Direct Marketing. I have participated in social networks and would like to share my experience on starting a community on a social networks and media sites. It requires 100% involvement & participation for making it successful just as you would need to start a new business. There is very thin line of difference between communicating to a community and communicating to a single user. You should be clear of what your site has to offer to the audience. Why should people join your community?

Once your community is built to a stage where it can sustain by itself. It requires minimum participation from your end and will reap maximum benefits. However in initial stages it requires all your time, effort, dedication and careful reputation management.

Social Networks & media sites are best place for reputation management and image building activity for big companies.

There are various smart ways to attract audience to join your community. Link Baiting is very hot topic among webmasters, SEOs, link builders.

If you are good at link baiting then you should know want content to be distributed to attract audience.

Use various content formats such as Videos, Images, Content for keep your community happy
You can organize contests, puzzles, quizes for engaging the users.
Understand & know your community group members, their preferences, geo location, profession, Interests.
Mostly the mode of communication is Email, Scrap book(Message Boards) or Chat.
Two main areas of management: Managing Content, Managing Users
Advertise you community on Blogs, Social Media sites and even on PPC program works good. Nobody has tried advertising

References:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/21/community.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/holy-mother-of-linkbait

http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitytypes.htm

This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

Social Media Optimization

kpraveenkumars — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:10:28 +0000

Social Media Optimization and Social Media marketing is a phrase used to increase the popularity of your website on various social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, Facebook, The Objective for SMO can be very different such as:

1) Brand Building: You want your website to be popular among Social media users, The idea is there is lot of people using Social networks, Social Media sites. How do you become popular among the users?

2) Reputation Management: To attain leadership in industry. You participate in forums, answers program to build an image of your company.

3) Networking with people in the same industry or related industry again for brand building and reputation management.

4) Building Backlinks and Traffic: Social media optimization’s biggest benefit is backlinks and traffic. Traffic directly from social media sites and traffic search engines due to backlinks from social media sites.

Advantages:

1) Ability to target your Market segment

2) No Media costs

Method:

It is form of viral marketing technique, 3 Success Elements in SMO: Linkability, Visibility/Discoverability, Popularity

It is 50% what you do and 50% what your users do. What your users do will depend on how you build your relationship with your users. For example: By providing an easy access to submit your content on social media sites there is good chance your users will post it, if your content is worthy.Therefore the process of making your website social media complaint is known as social media optimization.

Key features of Social Media Sites:

A) Social Media sites have large number of users, therefore increasing the visibility of your website on these sites will surely have marketing benefits.

B) Social Media sites have lot of information such as user profile data which can be effectively used to rank users, or target a specific set of users for advertising.

C) Social Media sites have high user activity, due which fresh content upload happens at frequent intervals sometimes faster than News & PR sites.

D) Most social media sites has the ability to measure the quality of user generated content/users quantitatively and are transparent to general audience and search engines.

For example Digg gives details on how many diggs on content, who has dug, who has blogged about the content, what are their user profile data. All these details are transparent due to which the quality of the site, quality of users and quality of content can be measured both by users and search engines.Elaborating the points stated by Rohit Bhargava on social media optimization.

· Increase your linkability: Linkability is definitely the first step of optimization wherein users must be able to link to your rich content from other websites/blogs. Every successful website/ online business inherently is aware of this.

· Make tagging and bookmarking easy, submitting content easy: In short this means encourage to people to link to your website or post your content on other sites. As website owner you must encourage your users to link to your content and make the overall process of linking simpler, by few clicks.

· Reward inbound links: When you reward your users by giving a link to them in return of their link, you will encourage them to write more about you. This is very nicely practiced by Google blogs, you can find Google blogs(Adwords blog, Webmaster central blogs etc) linking to every blog who write about them. This encourages blog writers to write more about Google and their latest news.

· Help your content travel: This is another important optimization. If you allow your content travel, you are also generating backlinks wherever your content is published. RSS feeds are great example.

· Encourage the mashup: Mashup is simple algo in which inputs one or more content and outputs a new content using standard functions. Do you know the behavioral pattern of users who visit your website? Find out the behavioral profile of your users:

A) Are they tech savvy?

B) Are they first time internet users?

C) How many of them have a blog?

D) How many of them have Orkut profile, facebook profile?

E) What is their Internet Usage frequency?

F) How many of your website users, have a profile in social media sites?

A website like irctc.co.in may not currently need a social media optimization, but a website like rajshri.com definitely needs one currently. It also depends on how you want to grow as online business and which market segment you want to target in future.

Create Valuable and useful content, junk content can never be able to achieve the traffic, rankings you desire. The content must be useful for the users in your market segment, so that your attract quality traffic.
Help the social media users to post, rate and review your content.
Participate in relevant social media site, and network with people.

Types of Social Media Sites

Various types of social media sites are reviewed on SEO, Traffic, Ease of Optimization: For actively promotion and building your community high participation levels are required in each of the below sites.

1) Bookmarking Sites: Most bookmarking sites are open for crawling; hence getting as many pages in other users bookmark list is beneficial.

2) Social Media Content Rating Sites like Digg, reddit, propeller etc.: The work has to be done in building your network, friends’ circle that diggs your content, only way to attain top rankings is high level of participation in combination with posting high value content.

3) Image Sharing Sites: Upload images, tag effectively, form groups & networks for sharing and tagging.

4) Video Sharing Sites: Sites like Youtube.com, Dailymotion host videos as well allow users to post them on blogs, link to them etc. Additionally there are users viewing your video & posting comments on your video.

5) Social Networks such as Orkut, Facebook etc: Very little SEO value, as most sites are not open for search engine crawlers. Ideal for reputation management.

Social Media Optimization cannot be separated with Search Engine Optimization as SEO reaps significant benefits from SMO activities. Moving forward Social Media optimization will be the way to optimize sites, as sites will focus more on personalization, local and building relationship with niche audience.ROI of SMO activities is dependent on what you measure as success. If generating backlinks and ranking on search engines is success for you then you must invest in SMO activities for generating backlinks only.

The question is how do you measure success?

If you have a small website you can measure traffic and backlinks. For this you can set up Google analytics with e-commerce tracking and goal conversions. Look at traffic from referral sites and you can find traffic from social media sites. Also, you can find increase in rankings for top keywords on search engines.For more study on Social Media Optimization you could find these links useful:

Online Marketing, Business Analytics, SEO SEM » social media optimization

Social Media Traffic

Social Media Optimization

Advantages:

Method:

Key features of Social Media Sites:

Types of Social Media Sites