Can Social Networking Build Traffic?
By Calvin Woon
Despite the popularity of social networking and the web 2.0 world, the majority of businesses have struggled to successfully use these communities to build traffic to their website or produce any kind of visible ROI. The cold, hard truth is that social networking isn”t always effective as a means of traffic generation. You actually have to put a lot of time and effort into the process, and you have to pick the right avenues of communication that best apply to what your business is and what you are trying to achieve.
What works for one company will not work for another company, it’’s that simple. For example, there’’s a social networking community known as Second World, in which people create avatars of themselves and interact in a vast virtual reality kingdom. As this became popularized, marketers began to flock there to try to capture the attention of a huge, untapped market.
But most businesses have absolutely nothing to offer the community with their presence there. Second World really only is useful for massive corporations with money to spare on creating a presence, and nonprofit organizations that people share passions and interests with. Outside of that and you”re outside of luck with Second World.
That same lesson applies to nearly all social networking communities. They each have their own spoken and unspoken rules that determine what is applicable on the site and what people will respond to. The thing that holds constant between all of the different networks is that you have to be an active and worthwhile member of the community to see results.
This means that you can”t use a social networking platform as another place to send a press release, or display an advertisement. It takes much more than that to draw people into you in these situations.
To be an active member of the community you have to pay attention to what other people are doing and saying, and you have to respond to it. You have to offer up more information and value than sales pitches by sharing common interests, hobbies, passions and missions. You have to associate with other people on the networks and you have to learn to provide your audience with what they are looking for. If you can do all of this successfully, you”ll see that yes, social networking can be used to build traffic to your website.
You”ll be able to see a great deal of direct and referral traffic by rousing up people’’s interest on the site itself. You can target the major, larger networks such as Facebook and MySpace and you can also seek out smaller, more targeted niche communities that deal more specifically with what you”re all about. You”ll also increase your presence in the search engines by adding to the incoming links to your website in the process.
Social networking can be very successful for traffic generation. It can also be a huge waste of time if you use services or tactics that don”t apply well. Therefore you have to pick and choose your spots and follow the unwritten best practices of each network or community in order to succeed and increase your website traffic.
About The Author
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