9 Social Media Traffic Tips

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. If in a crunch, you can’t get your social media activities done in an hour a week, you’re doing it wrong, if you’re doing it for business. There’s no reason you have to be on Twitter for hours to see results. There is a much better way.
2. While you can pick two to five major channels to concentrate on and echo content into the lesser channels of that type, it’s not the best strategy to do that with all of them. In other words, if you like Twitter the best of all the status update type sites, and you want to echo posts into identi.ca, it may not be Best, but it’s… okay. However, it’s not smart to implement a status update strategy on a site like LinkedIn. Professional networking is a lot more than status updates, and if that’s all you’re going to do on LinkedIn, why are you using it?
3. Numbers matter. They shouldn’t but they do. That doesn’t mean pursuing higher numbers at all costs will help you though. 5000 followers looks better than 100, but it’s not helping your steak restaurant if they’re all vegetarians.
4. Quality matters. It should. That doesn’t mean you should stop at 10 painters for your gallery’s account. You need to develop relationships with people who love art, people who talk or write about art, people who hang out with artists, and the people who sponsor them. Get a good mix.
5. Facebook now drives more traffic than Google in many instances, and is a top source of traffic even in the exceptions. Even if you don’t want to use your Facebook profile for networking, get serious about your Facebook page. You don’t have to love Facebook to use it for business.
6. Don’t be afraid to use social media as part of marketing – just don’t confuse social media participation as  marketing activity by default. Although social media itself is not a campaign, there IS such a thing as a social media campaign – case in point, if you organize bloggers to talk about your event at the same time, that’s a social media campaign. It has a beginning a middle and an end.
7. All media is social. Keep that in mind when you create web content. I can tweet, blog, podcast about anything I want. Social media as terminology is defunct, and only still used as a frame of differentiation between the old way and the new way.
8. Remember why you’re using social media. If you can’t leverage ANY of the social media relationships you’re forming to help you in your business, in some way, you have to ask yourself what the purpose of your participation is.
9. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and Delicious aren’t the only social media sites in the world. There are other top sites like BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, StumbleUpon, PlugIM, Sphinn, and Ecademy that can help you just as much or more than the current favorites. Test the ones in your niche, and get promoted there, too.