How About Landing Pages For The Social Media Visitor?

Marketers generally create landing pages for pay-per-click campaigns or other
advertising campaigns. So, why not create them for

social media sites? Granted,
it may seem impossible because it is hard to change the layout of your blog or
website just for visitors from like Digg,
Netscape, and
StumbleUpon. However, you can
make it so that if a visitor came from a social site, they would see a different
design.

Let’s take Search Engine Land as an example to explore this possibility.
Here are things from the current design that you might remove for any visitor coming from a social media site:

1. Advertisements

Visitors from social media sites generally hate
advertisements. They usually aren’t going to click on them either, so there is no
point in having them unless you have CPM-based advertisements. By not showing
ads to social media visitors, it will also seem like you aren’t making money,
which is usually good, because many of these visitors don’t like websites making
money off of “their” traffic.

2. Navigation

All the items in the sidebar should be removed because it can cause users to
navigate your whole site or other sites that you link to. The last thing you
want these visitors to do is navigate your site and possibly find something they
don’t like, which would decrease the chances of your site doing well on social
sites. You also don’t want to link to other sites because they may leave your
site and then forget to vote for your story.

3. Social Media Buttons

There is nothing wrong with placing social media buttons on your site so your
visitors vote for your stories, but you don’t want to show them off to visitors
that come to your site from a social site. Some may feel you only care for
traffic, or that you may care for other social sites and not the one they use. A
lot of these visitors are loyal and don’t like social sites that they don’t use.

4. Sponsored Links

Paid text links are usually affiliated with SEO and some
social media visitors may feel your site supports Internet spam. [Editor’s Note:
Our sponsored links use nofollow
for search engines that don’t get the JavaScript-based unit, meaning they are
within search engine guidelines — not that, as I explained in
Time For Google To Give
Up The Fight Against Paid Links?, that anyone can easily tell the "good"
paid links from the "bad" ones].

The Social Media Visitor-Friendly Site

Here’s a screenshot of new design just for social media visitors:

All of the marked boxes in the first screenshot were removed form this
screenshot, plus I added one more element, marked 6, and outlined in red.

This element has pictures of the Macintosh and Firefox logos because many social site users love these products and services. By
adding them, you are appealing to them, which may cause them to vote on your story.

You don’t want to necessarily use the social media design for all of your
visitors, but if you really want to maximize your website for visitors from
social websites, you may want to display a different design for them. Test it
out; you will see a world of difference. I am not advocating that you deceive
your visitors. You should just find ways to make them feel comfortable, and
ultimately your content speaks for itself.

Neil Patel is
co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes
regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog,
Pronet Advertising. The
Let’s
Get Social column appears Tuesdays at
Search Engine Land.