A Guide to Social Media Traffic for Bloggers

Social media is a platform enables visitors to share the content instantly with friends and other interested communities. Today social medias are one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to a website since it is very easy to invite your own friends or find the communities of same interest to read and share your content.

Facebook is one of simple example of social media having more than a billion user base. You can directly add Facebook like button or Twitter follow button to your site or use any social bookmarking tools like “Addthis” or “Sharethis” to enable users to share your content instantly with other.

Social Media Classification

• Social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Weibo
• Video sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Youku
• Blog sites such as Blogger and Tumbler
• Microblogging sites such as Twitter
• Social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg
• Content aggregator sites such as FriendFeed
• Wiki sites such as Wikipedia
• Online discussion forums like Digitalpoint
• Virtual worlds such as Second Life

Driving Traffic from Social Media

Here are some simple tips to make your site more popular and drive more traffic to your site using various social media site.

• Create a simple trailer or tutorial video and upload it in your YouTube channel. Link your site with your channel to drive traffic from YouTube videos. Click here to learn more about YouTube traffic.
• Create a simple Facebook page for your site and share interesting and related content. Target to gather your followers slowly and your site traffic will increase when the followers share your content on their timelines.
• Create a official company page in LinkedIn to update your users regarding the latest news about your business.
• Add Like or Follow buttons in your site header and footer to allow users to share your content instantly. You may also use social bookmarking options like “Addthis” or “”Sharethis”. Even Baidu Webmaster Tools offers Baidu Sharing Tool to add social icons to your site.
• Add web toolbar to your site to offer multiple social bookmarking options.
• Create a blog and share important site updates like new product offering and achievements.

Monitoring Social Traffic

Use social media to drive traffic to your site only up to certain limits, ideally the social media traffic should be 15 to 20% of your total site traffic. If you are using AdSense ads in your site it is highly recommended not to solely rely on social traffic. Google prefers search engine traffic rather than social traffic due to the reason that your own friends can help generating revenue for you.

Use Google Analytics to monitor the source of traffic to your site and take appropriate actions to maintain the traffic ratio between organic, ad campaigns, referral and social traffic.