Social media optimization
Many Internet marketers say, ‘lets create a Facebook page or Twitter accounts’. My reply to these Internet marketers is, build useful content on your own website that your visitors can use. Think about it who buys something from a Facebook page? Do you? Social media has horrible conversion rates. Social media is often clutter for teens.
The purpose of this post if to tell you how to market your website through social media optimization, but also how not to make SMO your main way of attracting visits.
Social media sites give you a limited weak way of generating publicity for your site. This is one way that you can use it to help your overall SEM plan. However, I do not recommend hiring a firm or consulting company to help you. I think your money and time is better spend creating something valuable for your site.
How to use social media optimization to increase traffic – this is all you need
You do not need to spend months researching this subject, I will tell you the most efficient way to do social media optimization.
- Install firefox
- Install a firefox add-on called shareaholic.
- Every high quality article you write submit to the social media sites with shareaholic. But only the really good ones.
That is it for social media optimization. You do not need a degree or to hire some hip and cool 20 something expert on it. Just write good content and from time to time but it out there on these sites you participate in.
Also do not spam these sites. If you do you will be banned from these Social media sites or your users on Facebook or Twitter will see you as a marketer and remove you from their list.
Just submit your best works. You do not want to be spamming your Facebook friends with cheezy affilate marketing links. However, if you are part of a real community than people will respond if you submit a relevant link. You also should not only submit your works but other people’s sites. Why? Not only is it good Karma, but its the way these social media optimization sites work. You will get respect if you find quality and lose power if you spam or submit junk.
Should you put a social button on your website
I do not. I have no social media buttons on my websites. In fact, I removed all the “follow me on twitter” etc links on my sites or all the “share this” type links. Why? After about a year of spending time with Social media optimization my traffic did not increase as much as if I spend it on writing content. Further, the traffic spikes were often one day and not quality. It takes up too much real estate that could be use for something more important. If someone likes an article they will twitter it anyway. I might add a Facebook like button, but not all 100 social media buttons.
Conclusion about social media optimization
Do not spend a lot of time researching the theory, rather, be active. It will generate a lot of traffic, even though not always the best traffic in terms of conversion, social media optimization will yield a nice boast of page views and maybe even a few links.
Therefore, I am not huge a fan of social media. It is a waste of time, and does not help users, is mildly annoying and often if you hang signs to ‘stumble this’ etc on your site it will give your site too many irrelevant outbound links.
Better is to let other people find your sites and social media it.
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