Social media marketing is the latest craze in
online marketing. It involves the promotion of your site or business
through social media channels. It is a very cost effective yet very
powerful strategy what can get you links, attention and enormous amounts
of traffic.
No other promotional method can
compare to the cost-benefit ration of social media marketing. With
almost no cost you can easily obtain large number of visitors, with high
probability that a significant portion of them will visit the website
again. As a matter of fact, social media marketing is a very universal
approach; it can make any website, not just business websites,
profitable over time.
Indeed, the potential
benefits of social media marketing are epic, and will be great waste if
not exploited. In spite of these, there are still those who are unable
to benefit from these massive potentials. Such people can be categorized
into three classes; the ones who know little or do not know anything
about social media, the ones who are interested but don’t know how to
utilize it and those who don’t believe in the worth that a social media
strategy can convey to a site or business.
The Value of Marketing through Social Media Websites
Creating link baits at popular social networking
and social bookmarking sites and being able to bring such baits to
popularity can get you two big benefits: primary and secondary traffic
and high quality links.
Primary and Secondary Traffic
Primary
traffic is the huge amount of visitors that come to your website
directly from the social media websites by clicking a link you or
another user of that social site posted. Secondary traffic is referral
from websites which found your site, page or content interesting and
placed a link to your site in their site. Such link is considered an
inbound link of you site and it will serve as a channel that will send
visitors to your site.
Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters
Skeptics
cite poor bounce rate as the main argument in using social bookmarking
or social news sites. Hence, they claim that such sites will only
provide your site with nothing but useless traffic as most of the time
visitors will only click a specific webpage and then click away. Well,
such claim is usually true.
Saying all traffic
from social sites is worthless is exaggeration. If your site has good
content that appeals to the interest of the general public your presence
in social sites is likely to become stable. And after stability is
reached, there will surely be a handful of users that will begin to
follow your site for updates. Detractors also pay no attention to the
power of much targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the
same niche will link to a story that’s well-liked on social sites,
because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done normally
on a daily basis for most.
Primary traffic does
come in very much larger volume than secondary traffic. Secondary
traffic can be considered more valuable if you prefer quality over
quantity. Yes, secondary traffic is of far superior quality than primary
traffic because visitors coming from links on other websites bring
people who are likely to be interested in your content. Such links prove
that others acknowledge the worth of your site which also at the same
time builds your brand thus leveraging your product, people who get to
read your content and end up liking it will likely recommend it to
others.
High Quality Links
Being
popular in popular social sites will grant you a huge number of links.
Some of these links may even help you with your search engine
optimization if such links are relevant to your site topics. If not,
they will still be beneficial in sending you visitors. A high-quality
story can realistically gain a hefty number of high quality editorial
links, most of which cannot be easily bought.
Links = Better Search Engine Rankings
Your
social media marketing campaign will aid greatly in your link building
and thus will help improve your search engine positioning. When a
website receives a huge number of natural, permanent links from trusted
domains, it builds authority. Search engines then trust it and give its
pages crawling priority. If you optimize your link-bait and website
structure appropriately, you can effortlessly start ranking for
competitive keywords, which will in turn fetch in search engine
visitors.
Doing enough
social media marketing
therefore will definitely increase your search engine traffic. It can
also be said that these links that generate secondary traffic for you
are built on borrowed trust. Many people still think that sites or pages
posted in social news and bookmarking sites are just going to be a
waste of time.
A new website will usually find
difficulty in getting links from sites that are not familiar with it.
But announcing your site in trusted news or content resource sites makes
getting links a whole lot easier. Always remember however that content
is still undoubtedly the king. Make sure your content is informative and
interesting as well as fresh and unique.
