With the advent of Web 2.0, social media has become an integral part of daily online life. It has become so powerful with its viral nature that succeeding in this arena may become a make or break deal for your website. If you plan to harness it, you might as well do it properly. Here are just a few tips.
1. Link Bait – The content on your site should be stuff that’s interesting and/or useful, the type that other people would want to link to and share with their friends. There are many ways to do this: having a blog on your site, offering free white papers, gathering breaking news, how-to articles, pictures, videos, statistics, and collections of multiple resources and tools.
2. Others First Policy – A common mistake rookies commit (including myself when I was starting out), is that they submit their own content to social media sites exclusively, right from the start. That’s a no-no. Build your reputation first as a source of great sites within the communities of these sites. Digg or Stumble other people’s content. Only when you get yourself a sizeable following should you start submitting your own.
3. Presentation – Now when you send other people to your site, make sure they’ll like what they see. Great content badly presented will not be terribly effective, negating all your hard work. So, make sure your ads, if any, don’t clutter up your pages. Check for the site design’s compatibility to major browsers and screen sizes. Add life to your pages by including relevant images. To make reading easier for your visitors, break the content down to sections and highlight the titles.
4. Buttons – All the popular social bookmarking sites have their own little buttons you could put at either the top or bottom of your post. If you’re using WordPress or some other CMS, make them part of your template.
5. Discuss – Social media sites have their own groups and forums. Try to join the discussions on topics related to your site. If there are questions you can answer, by all means offer your take on things. This helps to boost your ranking among the community. In forums that permit it, you can put a link to your site on your signature.
6. Reciprocate – If someone Diggs your article or posts it on a forum, write a thank you note to that person. If he or she has a blog, try to see if you like any of the entries and return the favor. You can also ask if this person wants to exchange links, which is mutually beneficial for climbing the search engine rankings.
5 Responses to “How to use social media for website promotion”
September 24, 2008
Daniel, The Hosting BlogIts so hard for me to get motivation to use these sites without getting something back from them. For instance, if I were to build a new digg profile without submitting my own stuff for a few months It would be hard for me to keep up with. I would feel like I wasted my time during those days even though it is for the greater good. I guess its just something I have to learn to control
March 4, 2009
NikolaI agree with Daniel about this one, it all requires macu time to spend on it, and it’s not guarantined success… I have profile on few social sites, butt I think that I must pay for website promotion, everything else is just not so effective…
March 5, 2009
Web HostingI want to add, it is also important to make sure that your blog post are unique. There are many websites which copy content from other free sources. For example from Wikipedia. Search engines are smart enough to identify that the content is copied. Search engines are also managed by humans to some extent, so if they think that a site has duplicate content it may lose SEO score.
June 24, 2009
mlgreen8753You made some very good points. People integrating video in their social media campaign should make sure that the video is either helpful or entertaining. This will help it go viral. You also want to submit that video to multiple video sharing sites like YouTube and to extend it’s distribution beyond a single site.
September 2, 2010
kimsanders14social media is booming these days. And this medium is probably the best way of promoting a site. Thanks for providing some tips regarding web promotions.