Social Media websites can drive insanely great
traffic to your blog if you have a good social media marketing strategy.
But it can drive fair amount of traffic if you just submit blog posts
regularly to your social media profiles.
Social media traffic is as important as organic
traffic from search engines as we can’t rely on Google alone. They
continue to push algorithmic updates like Panda, Penguin and who knows
the next could be Giraffe.
It means that we must diversify the way we get
traffic. I’m going to list the top social media and other websites that
you shouldn’t ignore or must use as part of your social media marketing
strategy.
I’m NOT going to list all the stupid social media or
the so called web 2.0 sites out there as I’m going to focus only on
sites that can drive traffic to our websites in one way or the other and
not for building backlinks.
Though the traffic quality of social media can’t be
matched with that of organic traffic, it is still important. It helps us
to keep the bounce rate low which is assumed to be one of the many
ranking signals used by Google.
Top 30 Social Networking (& Web 2.0) Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Blog
1. Facebook
Facebook has not only transformed the way people the
world over connect, communicate and share ideas, pictures, videos and
news, it’s made it possible for businesses to get their products across
to a mass audience in a sensational win-win manner.
With over a billion active users it’s the largest
social networking website. Leverage your Facebook friends and share your
blog posts regularly with your Facebook friends and fan base.
2. Twitter
Twitter is the second most popular social network
(microblogging platform to be more specific). If our content is viral in
nature then it can bring instant massive traffic to our blog/website in
no time.
3. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is web’s favorite professional networking
website with over 100 million active users. LinkedIn’s traffic quality
is better than that of Facebook and Twitter as it is mostly used by
professionals who are looking for job or business opportunities.
Also try,
- LinkedIn Groups — to discover like-minded professionals and join discussions.
4. Pinterest
Pinterest is the biggest thing that happened to social media after Twitter. According to a TechCrunch article Pinterest
drives more traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.
If your blog posts have quality images then you
shouldn’t ignore Pinterest. Just pin those images to Pinterest under the
right category and it can send quality traffic to you as Pinterest
users are known to
spend more money than Facebook or Twitter.
5. Google+
Google+ is Google’s answer to Facebook. Though they
call it a social network I wouldn’t call it a social networking website.
But that said, it is important to share your blog posts on Google+ as
social signals are now used to rank web pages.
And that’s not all! As you probably know Google now gives
importance to authors (
dubbed as AuthorRank).
For that they use data from your Google+ profiles. It means that if
you’re popular on Google+ then your blog posts are more likely to be on
top.
6. Reddit
Reddit succeeded where Digg failed. It’s not the
Facebook or a Twitter that killed Digg, Reddit killed Digg. If you write
content that’s viral in nature then Reddit can send you instant massive
traffic. Just make sure that you use
social media timing signals to share the right content at the right time.
7. StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is more or less a social bookmarking
platform. It used to send good traffic during my initial days of
blogging. I’m not sure about how many active users are there on
StumbleUpon but according to Wikipedia they have over 20 million users.
It won’t take more than 5 minutes to share your web
page on StumbleUpon and hence it is worth the try. You definitely don’t
want to miss even a single opportunity that can send traffic.
8. MySpace
MySpace. I’m not sure why this site still exists but I decided to include the same in this list as it was
once the most popular social networking site in the world. It even surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States in 2006.
9. Hacker News
Hacker News is
a community of programmers, entrepreneurs, and digital ninjas who share
“anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”.
So you can share your content (or from across the web) and can comment on popular Hacker News threads to promote your blog.
Hacker News is a lot more like Inbound.org except that Inbound.org is
all about marketing whereas Hacker News is all about technology.
10. Inbound.org
Inbound.org is not a social networking website but it
can send high quality traffic to your website if you got interesting
blog posts that are original.
Inbound.org is a great community of bloggers, marketers and other professionals who love to read and share interesting content.
11. Scoop.it
Scoop.it is one of the most popular content curation
tools. It helps you discover new content based on your interest and
you’ll also be able to create your own Scoop.it boards to add content
from your own blog. The Scoop.it community will be able to follow your
boards and you’ll be able to follow boards by others.
12. Delicious