Social Media can be an effective way to get traffic to your website, meet people in your industry, and connect with others. However, many people and companies aren’t using it very effectively. This article will show you some good ways to use the two biggest Social Networks (Facebook and Twitter) as well as give you some bonus tips on other ways you can connect with people online. I will be using the travel industry as an example but nearly everything I suggest can be applied to multiple industries and niches.

Facebook may be a good way of extending the reach of your blog and sharing it family and friends (if your all set to take that step). I suggest that you setup a Facebook page as the home blog on Facebook. You are able to set your blog posts to automatically post to this Facebook page. Once your page is set up, you might want to look into making a custom landing page. The default landing page for new people (to your page) is your wall. This is jam-packed with information and can turn people off which means they’ll never get back. A landing page is specially designed to present people more info about just what to anticipate from a page and encourages them to “Like” it.

Once your page is set up you can begin telling people about it. You could include a Facebook Like box for your blog or site to convert visitors into Facebook fans of your page. You are able to market it to your friends and family as well as any other forums or online communities you are a a part of.

Once you have a Facebook Page that is attracting people you need to keep them there. Update your page regularly with interesting content and try to pose questions that encourage a response. You want to get individuals to communicate withconnect to your page rather then just lurking.

Twitter is another fantastic tool for networking, especially in the travel community. There are discussions about travel going on all the time. You can find these discussions by searching a few of the following hashtags. #ttot #lp #rtw #tni #matador After you find an appealing tweet or link posted in twitter, respond. Give the tweeter props for posting it, retweet their link, or offer your opinions or advice. Your ultimate goal is usually to start building relationships online with people so that they will in return examine your websites or share your links.

One last way to connect with people who have similar interests online is through the use of forums. Forums are online discussion groups usually based around particular topics or industries. A great travel forum is the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree Forum. It’s a great place to meet people with similar goals, feelings, and desires. You can get and give travel advice, meet new people to travel with, or just swap travel stories. These types of forums exist for almost every industry/niche imaginable. They are usually free to join and you can link back to your site from them in your signature. They can be a very good way of getting targeted traffic to your site as well as getting the word about your product or service without seeming spammy.

Hopefully this article can provide you some ideas on how you should use Social Media to properly drive traffic (and sales) to your website or blog. I’ve used examples coming from the travel industry still the strategies outlined can be applied nearly anywhere on the net. So get out there and begin getting social!

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Tags: advice, blog, How To, marketing, online business, online marketing, PR, Social Media, social media marketing, Travel, travel blog, website

This entry was posted on September 13, 2011 at 8:01 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in marketing by Mitchell Scott No Comments Yet