Social Media

How to Turn Your Website into a Social Media Hub

Who is not on social media these days? It’s become a rhetorical question. From 80 year old Grandmas to 8 year old pre-teens, everyone’s a part of the social media circus that makes marketers jump through hoops to control the reputation and engagement of our brands. Pew Research reports that about 73% of all online American adults are active on some social media or another. 41% of these use multiple social media platforms.

Even after being around for over a decade, social media shows no signs of a real slowdown. The time that people used to spend on other things like browsing through the web, visiting websites of brands they like, they now spend on social media.

Americans already devote the largest proportion of the time they expend online by networking with each other and brands they like on social media.

As Jeff Bullas points out, this social media frenzy seems to be coming at the expense of visits to corporate websites. Coca-Cola which has over 22 million Facebook fans, saw traffic to its site drop by 40% in under 12 months.

Your website is your own little piece of real estate on the web!

On your site, you have 100% control over what is said about your brand. It is your digital spokesperson who does exactly what you say and does not charge a dime. So why would you want to drive precious traffic to ‘rented’ properties like social media whose rules you have no control over? Why not drive these eyeballs to your own site where you can convert these visitors into actual customers?

No one can deny the pull of social media. However, you need to combine the attractiveness of social media with the flexibility of your own website by turning social media’s strengths into traffic for your own site. Here’s how you do it:

1. Host your blog on your website

A blog is step one in content marketing. Companies that have blogs also have 97% more inbound links than those that do not. If you are serious about reclaiming your content and making your website a social media hub in its own right, create a blog and post on it regularly.

A blog builds its own readership which is beneficial to your website and its conversions. It can also be the destination that hosts other content used on your social networks, so that you maintain an archive of all your content on your own web property, as against leaving it solely on social networks where you just rent space without owning the property.

2. Publish regular content on your website or blog

Create content that is shareable and publish it first on your blog. You can either put a teaser of this content or in some cases the entire content itself as a link on your social networks. The idea is to give away only enough to arouse curiosity, so your fans and followers head to your site or blog to access the real meat of your content.

Allow readers to share their favorite posts from your blog to their network on social media with social sharing buttons. Selling handcrafted jewelry on your website? Add a Pinterest button on the image and other social sharing buttons on the product listing to allow your trinket aficionado to share their find with the rest of their friends. Who would complain about some free publicity on social media after all!

4. Show popularity index of each post on your post previews

Once you start posting regularly on your blog, readers will have a plethora of posts to pick from. In your post previews, show the popularity index of each post in the form of ‘number of likes’ or ‘number of shares’ or ‘number of retweets’.

When readers see that a certain piece has been recommended highly by other readers they are more likely to read it, out of a fear of missing out on important information. They are similarly also more motivated to share it with their friends on social media. This simple action can give you a viral post with no extra hard work on your part.

5. “Come here for more!”

Great content can make people go to great lengths to access it. Once you have a repository of exciting, interesting content, use this as a hook to drive traffic from your social networks to your blog or website.

With every piece of content you publish, ask them to head over to your blog to get their hands on more such delightful content. The content you share on your site can be created by you; it could also be relevant content created by others that you share after receiving their permission to use it and attributing it properly.

When you ask customers to leave a social network and head to your site or blog for more, it could be seen as an irritant. This is especially true if the user has to login to your site to access your premium content or share and comment on it. Avoid the hassle of filling up long winded registration forms that most customers balk at, by instead using social login solutions like LoginRadius that create a seamless transition between social media and third party websites.

Social sign-on allows your users to log into your website using any of their social media IDs and with the correct implementation, it gives you access to targeted data that the customer shares on their social networks. This has the potential to become a win-win situation!

7. Create a vibrant community on your blog

Encourage interaction between your readers on your blog. Invite comments and respond to opinions of readers on your posts. Give back constructive feedback to your readers that will make them come back over and over again to your blog in times to come. Share valuable insights relevant to your readers exclusively on your blog, making it a sought-after destination for users in your industry.

Allow comments on your blog via social networks – this makes it easier for the reader to comment without creating an account with your site first. The comment will be flashed on the timelines of the readers’ friends on their social networks, giving your original post more visibility in the process.

8. Send email alerts whenever you create new content

Remember to touch base with your newsletter subscribers whenever you have something informative or interesting. The idea is to draw traffic to your website by all means possible. If you have been capturing and nurturing an email database, put it to good use by informing customers via email whenever you have new content for them on your blog.

Make sure you include a teaser or preview of your content in the email to pique their interest and make them click through to your website. My friend Tracy Vides has put up some excellent examples of email marketing on Steamfeed that will help you get started.

Over to You

Your corporate website allows you to showcase the best side of your brand, without any outside filters or negative inputs that may color the opinion of a visitor. It is your brand’s face on the web and is something that you probably have invested a lot of money building and driving traffic to via SEO, Content Marketing, PPC, email marketing and more.

Add social media to this list of tools that you use to grow your website’s online reputation. Engaging with fans on social media is great. But getting them to land on your site and actually buy from you is even better. A social media hub is an idea whose time has come.

Don’t wait for your competition to beat you to it. Go ahead and do build your website into a social magnet!

7 Mistakes Which Makes You Dumb on Social Media

By Anmol Makkar 42 Comments

In a very short space of time, we’ve come a long way with Social Media. Social Media is a now a part of our lives and has become necessary and easy to run your business successfully.

Every famous Company of World is now largely focusing on its Social Network, than TV or Print Advertisement. So that’s why it’s necessary to move with trend and get customers/audience.

Facebook have more than a 1 billion active user and Twitter has more than 750 million users.
Social Media is like Word to Mouth Marketing – the best one.
Get better position in SERP’s and your blog gets better crawling by Search Engine bots.
Free traffic to your blog and Niche Oriented.
Easiest and best way to connect with your audience.
Blog Branding

To make a good Social Media presence, we just not need create a Fan Page or account and promote your products or services but we should have a good impact on your fans. Many people make mistakes initial, almost everyone. But we have to learn from our every mistakes, rather than doing it again and again.

#1 Not being Authentic and Transparent

One should never show himself something he’s not. To get a trust from your audience you should not be afraid to add your personal voice to it. Transparency is what Public demand and should not be ignored.

Be transparent about yourself and your skills. Public loves you only till you’re true to them. The good thing about being the single moderator, you don’t have to approve content with your partners to post updates.

#2 No Aims and Objectives

Lots of times you might have heard “Fail to Plan and Plan to fail”. Well its truth, if you don’t spend a bit of time on planning your Online Marketing, its going to be fail and maybe fatal also.

Before you start your Social Media campaign, initially its must to have Aims and targets for it. Set an achievable target, target the audience you want and where will you find them. These three are the most important objectives for any type of Social Media campaigns.

#3 Doing Hard Selling

This is where mostly people lose their trust and loyalty from the target audience because they spam their Facebook Page/Twitter account with just links and nothing valuable for the people.

Start giving useful content to them like updating some facts related to your market, funny images, asking questions and sharing videos with them, this will definitely going to boost your Online presence and whenever you will share links, they’re surely going to take it seriously.

#4 Treating it as a One-Way Broadcast Medium

Never ever mess with someone, who wants to have a conversation with you. You can fully automate your Pages by sending your blog feed regularly and can forget that you ever had a Social Media accounts for promotion, but surely it has a negative effect.

Social Media seems interesting only when it’s a two-way conversation between you and the community. Remember, Reply to every comments, Messages and other queries from your community.

#5 About section empty or seems ugly

About section is made to show a small description. Everyone before hitting like or follow button will see your bio, definitely if it seems interesting then only he will initiate .

Write an awesome description of your page. A

good example of description is “Founder of @ProBlogger & @DigitalPS, Author, speaker and eBook publisher. Husband & Dad to 3 boys. Love lattes & Leicas. Personal Tweets at @DarrenRowse”, this is the bio of Darren Rowse.

In his short bio, he mentioned his Working Fields correctly and also a bit about his personal life. A bad description can be “I Love cheese!” This small description will be the first impression of how much active you’re on Social Media.

#6 No Patience

Using Social Media is a long-term approach. For a new blog, it takes about 4-6 months to establish a following for his blog. You have to wait to create good followers of your blog and spend quality time in it.

Once it has been established it will continue to build traffic to your blog and people will come looking for you.

#7 Being Traditional, not using advanced tools

You’re out of town so you couldn’t post updates and then tell your visitors “I’m sorry, I went for a small vacation, I will update my account from now”. No you’re doing it wrong way, eventually people never like these type of lame excuses and people may lose interest in you.

You should know how to schedule updates, when you’re out to vacation. Use tools such as BufferApp or HootSuite to manage your Work. If you want, take some pain and try to update and be in touch using a Smartphone for them, there’s no better solution for it.

So the list I’ve compiled is over, but I know the list will be endless if I start to list every problem we make. Let us know what mistakes you’ve made by commenting below and how you coped with it.

Share it with your friends, so that they also don’t make mistakes in the beginning :)

Image Credit

Why Your Blog Posts Were Not Shared And Commented?

By Kimsea Sok 87 Comments

Many newbie bloggers and some older bloggers were wonder why blog posts were not shared and commented by their audiences.
There were some reasons which force users to shares and comments on your articles. The below tips are some of those reasons..

Why Blog Posts Were Not Shared And Commented?

#1 articles is not unique and quality contents

Most of the people love to read educational articles which are fresh update information. They could learn about new knowledge which gives them the more experience and expertise learning.

You know?

They may want to share those value information or educational articles to their friends, colleges, and families since it valuable expertise development. That is a simple reason why blog posts were not shared and commented or nothing at all.

The readers will enjoy and share you articles, if you have written a quality post which included above benefits of learning.

#2 you have no private relationship

How many friends in your social media connection? And did you have a strong relationship with them?

Well, private relationship is majority reason of why blog posts were not shared and comment. I have 2k+ follower, 2k+ fans, and 1k+ friends connect, especially I have built strong relationship with those peoples.

Whenever, I shared some information into social media profile they always help to spread my information by shared and commented on the posts and make it popular social release. Therefore, to build a stronger relationship will configure out the problem and give you the answer why blog post were not shared and commented by other people.

I suggested you to spend at least 30 minutes to 1 hour daily to the community with others friend connect through to them and talk about some social relation.

Tips for Building Real Connections to Help Your Blog Succeed

#3 Shares unattractive posts

Some blogger just share only links which make other people complicated and wondering about what inside the link. Moreover, links could attract other social media users.

Now a day most of the people are very busy with their current job, thus they will never waste their time to click on some links and no valuable information.

The time constrain is another important reason of why blog posts were not shared and commented. Actually, most love to keep working and don’t want to interrupt their work without any benefit such your link.

To make those people skip their value time to click on your link you have to put some call actions such as added attractive image and brief information about value content inside the article.

Social media strategy is like WTO trading. None membership traders will gain less benefit from doing international trading.

You know there a group call CommentsDX which all members could exchange some comments with other members and gain the value of sharing to post of each other. When you ask a question why blog posts were not shared and commented, you should ask yourself that did you joint any networks or groups which benefit for increase more blog comments and sharing.

Proven Ways To Get More Traffic From Facebook

When first time I start integrated social media as marketing strategy, I am afraid to share other bloggers and competitors posts.

I am really wondering about my audiences will move to other bloggers or to my competitors websites. But absolutely no, sharing other bloggers or competitors post will make audiences love you and enjoy more big resources of information entire your social profiles.

Sometime your post will be shared and commented by others since you always like or commented them.

Right now it is your turn

Thanks for reading my tip: why blog posts were not shared and commented. I think that it may not a unique idea to increase more share and comments, but I think that these above tips are still working. I believe that it will benefit for newbie bloggers to implement social media strategy.

Did I missed any point? Are you getting good comments and shares on your blog post?

Do share with us below.

Little-Known Ways To Make The Most Of Social Media

By Ammar Ali 22 Comments

Most people that do anything with blogging, marketing, or SEO have a good idea of the importance of capitalising on Social Media sites to increase rankings, sales, and consumer awareness. If your website is powered by WordPress, I highly recommend you to check out these best social sharing plugins for WordPress. These plugins are easy to install and setup, and best of all they will make your website more engaging!

Since every article they have read stated the importance of it, they added the ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons as told. If they are diligent they have sent out a ‘tweet’ as they added content and shared their posts on their personal Facebook and the blog Facebook fan page as well.

So they are doing an excellent job of utilising the social media to leverage ranking, sales, and consumer awareness, right?

Wrong!

They have done what 80% of all bloggers and companies do. They have added some icons to a webpage and spent a couple hours one afternoon setting up the social media accounts, and are waiting for it to ‘catch fire’ and work magic for them. Only problem is that it never does.

The Plain Truth…

The plain truth is if it were that easy to do, and as easy as most of the blog posts seem to indicate it should be it would be of no use at all.

If it worked like that then it would have equal value to every website thereby cancelling the positive marketing affects you are striving for. In my personal opinion the only thing worse than not using the social media at all is placing the icons on your blog or website then not using them correctly.

Social Media is a group of interactive communities.

The only way to reap a benefit from them is by interacting. To put in in perspective let’s consider basic human nature because when dealing with the social media you are working on a people to people level more than a business to people level. Look at the following examples and see how they correspond in social media courtesies.

You are walking down the street and pass by another person. There are several possibilities of what transpires.

You both glance at each other, ensure there is room to pass and go on your way.

A few seconds later neither have any memory of passing each other and neither good nor bad impression of the other as a person.

This is the equivalent of having no social media presence on your blog. Aside from an unknown mutual interest or need that brought you by happenstance to the same general place at the same time you have no personal bond or affinity.

You glance at each other, make eye contact and exchange a pleasantry of “Good Afternoon”.

You both feel like the other person ‘seemed nice’ and that it must be a friendly area. You will not remember it clearly but when you think back it will seem like it was a nice afternoon.

This is the equivalent of having a social media buttons and politely encouraging their use. It gives the impression that the input and notice of the visitor is important. When you see a tweet or share you acknowledge it and thank them.

You glance at each other and you say “good afternoon”, the other person averts eyes and continues on by.

You immediately wonder what was wrong with the other person or yourself and want to be someplace else. If somebody asks about your afternoon you will immediately remember the obnoxious person.

This is unfortunately where most social media interactions fall on the web. It may not be quite as cognizant as that but it is the same effect. They visited your site, shared or joined your Facebook page because they were happy with that they saw but when they ‘followed you’ or said hello on your page they received no acknowledgement. The only impression in their mind is they were polite to you and you did not return the same courtesy.

The entire premise of social media is to get people talking about you, your blog, or your product. It is virtually impossible to get people talking about these things (in a positive light) if you are not talking to them.

If they follow you on twitter but you never ‘tweet’ then there is no conversation or interaction for them to talk about. If they post a question or comment on your Facebook page or timeline and you do not respond they will stop talking and decide if you are not interested then neither are they.

If you have all the social media sites set up and they are all silent all the time leaving you to wonder why you bothered or what the big deal is consider if you are actually using social media or if it is simply there as a decoration on your website.

When Is It a Good Idea to Blog for Exposure and Not Money?

Best Practices To Make Most of Social Media

Respond to EVERY comment on Facebook. Even if it is just a ‘like’ or to say thank you or exchange a pleasantry do not be the person that walked by and looked the other way.
In general it is better to leave a negative comment and respond appropriately than to delete it. It shows character and builds confidence of others reading.
If you see a share of your post, product, or reference to your blog or product comment if you are able or send a one line thank you message to the person that shared it. This will encourage them to continue sharing and show others how interested in their opinions you are.
Consider strongly when somebody pins something of yours on Pinterest or follows you on any of the media sites to do the same in return. Once again it encourages them to continue and makes them remember you look for you as opposed to overlooking your future shares and tweets.
Set a schedule on a near daily basis to go through the social media profiles of your blog or blogs and respond to all as needed and if there is nothing to respond to then have something to add or say yourself. Do not be a salesperson all the time – simple comments on other things are perfectly acceptable but do not go silent for days and weeks on end.
Remember that you can learn a lot from other people in similar fields as you. It is a big world; we are not all competing for the same market. Following, posting comments, and sharing with and from others in the same field is an opportunity to learn other best practice, receive peer recognition, make friends, and gain inspiration and insight for future projects and developments. If you see good posts do not be shy to share them even if similar to something you would place on your own blog.

If you follow the best practices and are social on social media sites interacting with people then instead of just walking by on a street you are stopping to talk to friends and they will genuinely remember you.

Amanda Revie is a social media and search engine optimisation specialist in the UK.