Bigger Levers For Your Social Media Campaign

We all know that getting on the homepage of

social media sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Netscape can drive tons of
links and traffic, which is why we try and leverage these social sites on a
regular basis. But are you leveraging them fully?

Below, some tips not to overlook, such as the importance of good post titles
to encourage relevant anchor text, the need to keep content concise, pushing
your feed URL and content being king.

Good Post Titles

SEOs know that the titles of their articles should contain the terms they
want to be found for. But those titles might not be the most attractive to
visitors at social media sites. That’s OK. Your submission to sites like Digg
doesn’t have to use the same exact title of your article. However, you still
want your submission to make use of the key terms you want to be found for. That
helps ensure those seeing your article via these sites might link to you using
those titles — and thus getting your key terms in anchor text, which helps with
rankings.

Example: Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz wrote the

Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. The post did very well on
social sites such as Del.icio.us, and because of the post title, he now ranks
high on Google for the phrase
search
engine optimization.

Keep It Concise

Social media visitors in most cases don’t like reading a lot content. Because
of this, you want your content to be easy to read, short and to the point. Make
sure your introductory paragraph is enticing enough to get people to read the
rest of your material. By doing this, you will get more people to read and like
your content, thus increasing the chance that they actually link to it.

Example: Brian Provost wrote a simple article called
How
To Generate Targeted Site Traffic Without Search Engines and it received
over

900 links after getting on Digg.

Push The Feed

Visitors from social media sites probably will not click on ads or purchase
products, but that doesn’t mean they are useless. One way to get them to keep on
coming back to your website is to place a
big RSS button in their faces. By doing this, some will subscribe to your
site, which will also cause some of them to submit future content from your site
to these social sites. The other great thing about RSS is that you could place
ads within your RSS feeds, which is one way to make more money.

Example: John Chow has been on
social media sites like Digg dozens of time, which has helped him get over
300,000 pageviews, 4,000 RSS subscribers, and $8,500 in monthly revenue.

Content is King

Content, content, content. The more you have, the better chances you may have
of getting traffic. Social media users love to give input through comments, but
tons of websites or blogs make it difficult to comment. Don’t require users to
sign-in, and don’t place any other barriers that may stop them from
participating. Instead, invite them to give their input by baiting them at the
end of your content. [Editors Note: Yes, we require sign-in here against Neil’s
advice. We understand the trade-off this causes in terms of potential comments.
More on that is covered
here].

Example: I wrote a simple article on

Google’s Growing List of Domains which encouraged comments, and it ended up
receiving 168 of them after getting on a few social sites.

These are just some of the ways I know of leveraging social media traffic.
What other ways have you found effective?

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.

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