Looking for a social marketing strategy to increase traffic to your website? Why not start with the most trafficked social networking site on the Internet? Facebook has over 110 MILLION users from all interest and business groups… so you’ll be sure to find lots of people in your niche market.
This social marketing promise-land is made up of members ranging from the fast-growing 25+ demographic to university students. If you devote, say, an hour a day to social marketing on Facebook, over time you can:
- Increase traffic numbers to your website by the thousands
- Get lots of relevant inbound links
- Target your advertising
- Advertise your business for free
- Improve your SEO with news feeds
- Get the word out about yourself and your products
You don’t need to have people looking for you to be successful social marketing on Facebook. The whole idea is for you to get social and go out and mingle with people of similar interests and ideas. When you start exploring Facebook, look into starting your own group and being a active part of other groups. Add your two bits and start lively conversations. This has the potential to start an incredible viral effect leading to a dramatic increase in traffic.
Social marketing on Facebook works because the members are passionate about this web community. They’ll comment about you, write about you, and even get you into popular bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. Just one leader in Facebook who learns about you has the potential to dramatically increase targeted traffic to your website.
Besides socializing, you can increase traffic to your website by taking advantage of Facebook applications:
- Social marketing with Facebook Notes: If you want to set up a Facebook page that will pull people back over and over, then Notes great. Once you install it you will see it on the applications list found on your profile. If you click on “mynotes” you will see a spot where you can add your RSS feed which will look something like this: [http://blog.YourSite.com/index.xml]. Once you start playing with your display settings, I would suggest having at least three to five headings showing to keep generating interest. Remember you need to keep this regularly updated. Facebook tends to have a morning rush hour — people come in to work and check Facebook. So think of your network’s time zone and try to have your something new in your feed by around 7:30 – 8:00 am.
- Social marketing with Flog Blog: Another great application is Flog Blog which lets you add RSS items to your Facebook profile, displaying the headline and lead sentence, lead paragraph, or a set number of characters. Posts displayed in your Facebook profile can either link to your blog itself or to the Flog Blog application’s “canvas page,” within Facebook. It’s an easy way to post your news, latest blog posts, or what-have-you onto your Facebook profile. This can help you reach other people so you gain more visibility as your updates are broadcast to other Flog Blog members. It will net you more friends as well. Remember: in Facebook, people are watching what their friends are looking at. On top of that, you get to link back to your own website. If you don’t like the look of something (like where an application puts a link or shows a feed on your profile) you can change it later. Your main goal here is to just get the word out so you can increase traffic! Include your feed link just as you did with Notes. Put in a keyword-rich title for your blog (which it should have already) and a keyword-rich descriptive tag line.
- Social marketing with My Box +: You can add any HTML to your Facebook page with this great little app. So start with an opt-in offer to your email list. All you have to do is to take the opt-in code from your website, install My Box, and paste in the code so you can collect email addresses right from Facebook!
No matter which Facebook application you use (and there are thousands of them), make sure that whenever you’re given the “Link Back To” option, link back to your website or blog. Otherwise it will just default to your Facebook profile. And the whole point of getting started on Facebook is to send people to your site or blog so you can dramatically increase traffic!
So get in there and play around on Facebook. The rewards from social marketing don’t come overnight, but as a fun way to increase your website traffic and improve your SEO, Facebook can’t be beat.
