Are You Using Social Media? I'm Getting Crazy Traffic!
- SEO |
It's great because now I get more traffic from social media than from searches.
I have pretty much one main authority site that I work on ever since I got into IM a year ago.
I've never used social media for my site before. I put up a twitter page, but that was it. Never bothered with anything else and I picked up about 100 followers on twitter without doing anything. Just follow a bunch of people, and a percentage of them and their followers will follow you back.
A few weeks ago, I was reading a bunch of interviews from bloggers such as Neil Patel, Timothy Sykes, etc and they talked about viral content. Making a post that just gets shared and spread like wildfire on the social web.
Now, in my niche, there's no way I can make a post that becomes viral, but I decided to try for a fraction of that anyways.
The first things I did was install Digg Digg. A social sharing plugin for wordpress.
Next, I made a facebook page, and a stumbleupon account. For my experimental viral content, I decided to try two different pieces of content. One is an infographic that simply illustrates a How To in my niche. The next is a top ten list made clearly for humor.
I created the posts, and submitted the pieces of content on stumbleupon, facebook, and twitter and the traffic is crazy these last few days. Stumbleupon is not hard to use. If you have an account, you simply just submit your page, and that's it. If people are liking it and sharing it, it will become more popular and presented to more and more people who stumble in your category.
Was it viral? No. I'm not getting tweeted and retweeted, and liked and followed. It's just not that kind of niche. But, the stumbleupon sharing is huge. The top 10 humor list is definitely the winner. I guess it's true what they say. People love lists, and if they laugh, they will share.
I kind of expected more sharing of the content on facebook, but I haven't noticed anything spectacular. A few likes and a few comments, but nothing more.
Now, as some of you may know, Stumbleupon traffic is not that great. For those of you looking for conversions, you probably won't see much of it from traffic from Stumbleupon. However, it's a lot better than in the past.
Traffic from twitter is like 0. I'm not getting anything. Probably because I've only followed random strangers in my niche and they followed me back. I've never interacted with them and as a result none of them give a hoot about my website or my tweets.
Facebook has really targeted traffic for me. I'm not buying likes, so I have less than 50 at the moment. However, the traffic I get from facebook is awesome. For a facebook page, I simply created my page, shared some content from my site and some comments, and then I searched a bunch of people in my niche. On their page, I liked them obviously, but I also posted on their wall with a hello. I'm getting like 1-2 new likes per day.
Rankings?
Like I said, I've pretty much been working on this one site since I started. I mistakenly chose ultra competitive niches with nothing but authority sites at the top. Because I started using social media right during the time of the recent google update, I can't be sure of what caused it, but my rankings have increased. For my main keyword, I have finally made it to the first page. Again, I don't know if it was the algo change or because of a lot of social sharing of my site's content that caused this.
I've bought a lot of crap backlinks in the past from Fiverr so why wasn't I penalized? It just goes to show that authority sites rule. My site has over 100 pages of hand written content. I've been naturally linked to from university sites in my country, and the top authority sites in my niche.
If you haven't already, try using social media on your site. It probably won't work if you've got thin MFA sites. It kind of teaches you a lesson, too. Make content that people will want to "like".
Custom Facebook page design, Facebook Ads management, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Google Plus, Instagram, social sharing, SEO, content production, video production, whatever you want.
If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.