Social Media Mavens / Experts

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website. 

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

In this guest post Steven Snell (who writes about social media at Traffikd) examines the topic of generating readership for your blog through social media.

Image by shoothead

If you spend much time on social media websites, I’m sure you’ve noticed that you tend to see many of the same websites and blogs on the front page receiving the most exposure. A few months ago I wrote a post at Daily Blog Tips that posed the question Do Small Bloggers Have a Chance with Digg? Through my observations and through the comments from many readers, it’s clear that large websites and blogs have a distinct advantage over smaller blogs when it comes to social media. Obviously, this can be frustrating to new bloggers who are looking to get some much-needed exposure from social media, as it seems to be the rich just getting richer.

One question that needs to be addressed is, what is the most significant factor that leads to the success of these large websites with social media? Is their content just that much better than smaller blogs? In my opinion, many times this isn’t the case. Is it because they have a larger existing audience? I’d say this is often a bigger factor than the quality issue. Very popular blogs tend to do well with social media, and with their incredibly large subscriber bases, they have a distinct advantage.

Take for example the front page of Delicious. Typically it takes about 100 bookmarks within 24 hours or so to get to the front page. It seems like almost every day there is a post from Smashing Magazine or Zen Habits on the front page. With over 60,000 and 50,000 readers respectively, a small percentage of subscribers can easily put these posts on the front page with a bookmark. On the other hand, a smaller blog with only 100 subscribers would need one bookmark per subscriber to make the front page.

So how does this affect smaller bloggers who want to get better results from social media? Essentially it shows that great content alone is usually not enough. It takes a gathering to build a crowd. Meaning, your gathering of existing readers and your network of friends can help to result in a bigger crowd that comes from social media sites.

New bloggers that are targeting social media, or those who have just been disappointed with their results to this point need to focus on building the gathering before the crowd will come. Networking is probably the most significant activity for bloggers in terms of gaining social media traffic. A blogger’s network includes readers and subscribers as well as friends and contacts who are bloggers themselves. Members of your network will be much more likely to vote for you on social media sites, plus you can openly ask for their help when you need it the most.

There are several different ways to get social media votes:

1 - Visitors of social media sites can see your link at the social media site and vote there (example, a Digg user visits the upcoming page, clicks through to your link, returns to Digg and votes for your post).

2 – Visitors of your blog can vote by using a button, widget, or link on your blog.

3 – Visitors can use a toolbar to vote (examples, StumbleUpon and Delicious toolbars).

4 – Social media users can share your post with their friends (example, the shout feature at Digg).

5 – Bloggers can email (or IM) others in their network to request a vote.

The only one of these that is not affected by the existing “crowd” of a blog is #1. Getting votes from the upcoming page is not really affected by how many readers you have at your blog, rather it is affected by how many people see the item on the upcoming page, the quality of the title (in terms of attracting clicks), the quality of the content once people click-through, etc. Certainly there are some small blogs that have success this way without a network, but this seems to be the minority.

All of the other four are affected by how many people are seeing the page and how many people are in the blogger’s network. Let’s quickly look at each one. For #2, the more visitors a page has (which is impacted by the number of subscribers), the more opportunities it has to get votes through a button. If a post only gets 5 visitors, the most votes it can possibly get through a “Digg This” button is five. On the other hand, if the post gets 5,000 visitors, its potential for votes just multiplied by 1,000. The situation in #3, visitors voting using a toolbar, is exactly the same scenario.

Item numbers 4 and 5 are both impacted by the blogger’s network of friends and contacts. If you have a large existing network and you’re willing to ask them for some help occasionally, you can get some quick and easy votes. Whether you’re using a share feature at a social media site or simply sending a private email, your success will depend on the quality and quantity of connections you have made in addition to the quality of the content itself.

I Don’t Have a Crowd. What Can I Do?

Understanding how all of this works is good, but if you’re a new blogger with a limited network and a small base of subscribers it doesn’t help you very much, yet. If you’re looking to improve your results with social media, do what you can to get one step closer to blogs that have a bigger reach than you. Work on building your network and send as much traffic as possible to your posts.

Here are a few tips:
1 – Still focus on content

In order to build your crowd you’ll need to give them a reason to consistently read your blog. Publishing high-quality content is the best way to do this. Although I said earlier that the existing audience is often more important than the content itself for social media success, the content still needs to be of a certain standard of quality.

2 – Dedicate time to networking

Most bloggers network casually whenever it happens. This is fine, but you can step up your network by making it a priority. Use social media sites and other blogs as opportunities to connect with other bloggers and get to know others who share some of your interests. Be active on blogs in your niche and make an effort to get to know those bloggers. Don’t limit your involvement with just A-list bloggers. Make an effort to get to know other bloggers who are at the same stage in the blogging lifecycle as you. In this case you’ll be able to help each other as you both grow your blogs.

3 – Funnel traffic

Most bloggers create posts from time-to-time that they expect to draw some attention from social media. When you have a post that you want to get some exposure, don’t just focus on getting Diggs or Stumbles. You can use smaller social media sites and niche social media sites to funnel traffic to the post. As visitors come from other social media sites they may also Digg or Stumble your post. If you have some other way to get traffic to these posts, such as getting a link from a friend or from a community website, do so. The more visitors you can get to the page, the better your chances will be of getting some votes.

4 – Don’t be afraid to ask for a vote

Some bloggers and social media users don’t like to ask others for a vote. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, I’ve found that other social media users who are legitimately your friends (not just someone you added as a friend at Digg) will be happy to give you a vote if your content is worthy, and you can return the favor for them as well. I get a decent number of requests each week, and as long as it’s from someone I know and not just a spam request, I’m happy to at least consider the vote.

After The Gathering is Built

Once you have built a gathering of subscribers and those in your network, drawing the crowd from social media will be incredibly more realistic. Not only will it be more realistic, but it will happen more frequently, as you can observe from the larger blogs mentioned at the beginning of this post.

What’s Your Approach?

How do you go about getting votes for social media? Is your success with social media impacted by your network?

Last week I asked readers about their biggest sources of traffic to their blogs.

The results reveal a fairly striking winner - Google.

The comparison between Google and ‘Other Search Engines’ was fairly amazing - but what did interest me was the number of bloggers reporting Social Media sites as their number 1 source of traffic (15%). I’m sure if I’d asked this same question 18 months ago that they would have barely registered on the results.

But how exactly do these peer influences work? What motivates a person to share a piece of media with a group of friends or participate in an online community? How does one person’s purchasing behavior affect another’s?  Who are the consumers doing the influencing? And how can you design for influence? In this article, I discuss the motivations to share, how the location of a person in a network plays a role, and whether you can market to those influencers. I then provide tactics specific to the retail sector to take advantage of peer influence.

Motivations to Share

Abraham Maslow emphasized that personal value precedes network and social value in his hierarchy of needs theory. He argued that most people are not selfish but self interested  – they are always searching for an answer to the question – what’s in it for me?  This applies to the web domain where people don’t share and allow peer influences to take place just for the sake of it. People share online when they are incented to and when there’s potential for personal value to be realized.

Clay Shirky and Peter Kollock also point out that once a person has been able to derive strong individual benefit from a particular experience, the motivation to share increases significantly. This happens as the user realizes that through the collective action (or experience) there’s opportunity to derive even more personal value from it.

What are the implications of this? When you design a website or online marketing campaigns, remember that if the experience isn’t valuable to one person, it won’t be to a hundred, a thousand, or a million people. Tied to that, consumers must be able to derive greater value through the act of sharing for them to make that effort. For example, a person would be more likely to share a piece of media to influence a peer if the act of sharing enhances his reputation among those peers or if it encourages the peers to participate in the social activity too.

Location in the Network

Not everybody is inclined to play a role in influence either. People use the Internet in different ways, and their usage patterns dictate how likely they are to share information and influence each other. But more than that, their location in an online community or social network heavily influences their likelihood of playing a role in influencing others.

The closer a person is to the center of the conversations, and the more people he is connected to, the more likely he is to influence his peers. Because he is directly involved in many different conversations, his peers typically treat him as a credible or appealing information source. They get used to getting information from him and get used to sharing information with him, providing him with something to respond to in turn.

As a result, this person is in a much stronger position to influence a peer than someone who only occasionally participates in the conversation or is just loosely connected to the group. In fact, this is how the influential bloggers work too – because they are at the center of conversations sharing a lot of information themselves, they have lots of influence.

The same philosophy applies to networks of friends and how they share information online. Why does this matter? It is important to recognize that not every Web user is a candidate for peer influence. Only those that are at the center of their networks communicate actively and regularly with their peers and can play this role. Look for those people, and meet their needs as you design for influence.

Influencers are not Brand Advocates

A report from JupiterResearch highlights that nearly 25% of all online adults are brand advocates. They are more likely to research and purchase products online too. But as the reported pointed out, these brand advocates focus on gathering product information and purchasing them, rather than spreading the word through social media sites. They are not the most important influencers.

Rather, the most important influencers are the people who play a role further down the purchasing funnel. They are the people who are solicited for advice while a consumer is in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision. These people are in the consumer’s network – online and offline. They serve as validation points sharing their own experiences of a product with the consumer, pointing the consumer to resources that can affect the purchasing decision, and weigh in with their own opinions. How do you reach them?

Contrary to traditional word-of-mouth marketing strategies or even viral marketing, you don’t. You let your potential customers, who are in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision, reach out to them. Why? Because these influencers don’t vary by product, rather they vary by consumers. And it is difficult for you as a marketer to know who the core influencers for a brand consideration or particular purchasing decision are. In some cases, it may be the consumer’s parents or it may be the friends, or peers at work or relatively anonymous peers in a discussion forum, or maybe a combination of all these.

Tactics for Success

So if you cannot reach these important influencers that are having a far greater influence on purchasing decisions than any other form of marketing, what can you do? You can formulate your web strategies to allow for those peer influences to take place. I introduced some tactics in my previous article, here are some more but specific to online retail experiences –

1. Integrate more deeply with the social networks. Yes, your consumers are spending a lot of time on these social networks, and that won’t change anytime soon. Office Depot allows consumers to post messages directly to their Facebook profiles, or into their newsfeeds, about products they are interested in. It does this from the product page on its site. It makes it easier for a consumer to solicit feedback from his peers.

Other e-retailers should follow by integrating directly with the social networks allowing consumers to get feedback more directly during their purchasing process. For example, a consumer should be able to take a product from a retailer Web site, post information about it in his social network, and solicit feedback via a poll from his network seamlessly. No one does this today.

2. Point customers to third-party review sites. Consumers are going to go to third-party review sites regardless of what you tell them on yours. So rather than trying to stop them, point your consumers to the most authorative and credible ones out there. They will appreciate this and return to your site once they are ready to make a purchase. Most sites point to favorable product reviews in the mainstream media, but that’s not enough.

By pointing to the blogs and review sites themselves, consumers will know where to look for more information, and they’ll find communities of peers looking to make similar purchases. These are peers that can positively influence them.

3.Tie more directly with the offline shopping experience. Consumers move between the online and the offline space as they make product purchasing decisions. The iPhone and other mobile devices that simplify web surfing are making this happen more. In fact, Google has seen a 20% increase in searches from mobile phones in the last few months.

Therefore, as you think about an online shopping experience, keep in mind those offline scenarios and how social influence can support them. A consumer might be surfing to your web site or broadcasting to his Facebook network asking for advice while standing in a retail outlet looking directly at your product. So for example, consider publishing the customer reviews for a particular product that were originally published online in the retail store itself. Staples is already doing this successfully.

4. Make the product a strong discussion point. We’re used to thinking of products in terms of features and specifications in relation to other products on retail Web sites. Separately, we think of online communities and social networks as places where people talk to each other. Those two worlds can blur if you allow for more conversations around the product. It’ll lead to more peer influences.

Amazon has started doing this with their Customer Discussions. These aren’t customer reviews, rather, they are forums to discuss the products and everything about them. They are designed to enable conversations about a product that people are interested in.

5. Leverage your employees to build online communities. Both Best Buy and Circuit City in different, but exciting ways, encourage their employees to participate in their online communities on their retail Web sites. These employees answer customer queries about specific products, advise each other on technical issues and demonstrate that there are real, authentic people who care behind the brand.

Why does this matter? Because when these employees play authentic and personal roles in online communities where consumers are making purchasing decisions, they blur the lines between sales representative and peer influencer. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily which is why these retailers, and others, should encourage their employees to participate in third-party online communities too – as long as they do so honestly, authentically, and appropriately.

Social Influence Marketing™ takes many different forms. As we’ve seen, at the root of Social Influence Marketing™ are the peer influences that can positively affect brand affinity and purchasing decisions. Taking advantage of social media, by tapping into the Social Influence Marketing™ concepts, requires a more rigorous understanding of those peer influencers. Only through a focused understanding and appropriate design tactics can you take advantage of one of the most important dimensions to marketing today.

With social media marketing, numbers get thrown around a lot. How many visitors did you get to a particular post? How many visitors were sent from which social media sites? How many inbound links were gained? While these are some of the reasons that most of us are involved in social media marketing, it’s easy to get distracted by the numbers an lose focus of what you’re really trying to accomplish.

Ways that numbers can be deceiving:

1 – Visitors from social media can’t accurately be compared to other types of traffic sources

Getting 1,000 visitors from StumbleUpon is much different than getting 1,000 visitors from search engines. It’s also different than getting 1,000 visitors from online advertising. It’s very difficult to compare social media traffic stats to other sources because it is so much different. The standard answer is that social media traffic is less valuable than other types of traffic, but this isn’t always the case. Niche social media sites can send highly-targeted visitors, and there are plenty of other traffic sources that aren’t the highest quality. Try to avoid comparing apples to oranges.

2 – Visitors from one social media site can’t be compared to another

Each social media site has it’s own unique audience. It’s very difficult to compare the the traffic you get from two different social media sites. Digg may send 20,000 visitors to a post, but the 1,000 you received from a niche social media site may have been more valuable. Because each site is different, try not to judge one audience simply because it doesn’t compare favorably to another social media site in terms of numbers.

3 – Social media can be manipulated

Social media marketing sometimes blurs the line between optimizing a site for social media and manipulating the results. A website that draws huge numbers of traffic to genuinely high quality content will have better long-term results than one that gains an advantage in order to send traffic to content that isn’t of the highest quality. Essentially, manipulating the results may produce impressive numbers, but the results will be disappointing if the content isn’t worth the attention that it got.

4 – Return on investment is difficult to calculate

With other types of marketing and advertising, return on investment is going to determine the success of the campaign and future efforts will be built around these results. With social media it’s difficult, if not impossible, to calculate ROI accurately. There are so many elements that are involved with social media marketing that don’t produce results that can be measured with specific numbers.

5 – You can’t rely on traffic from social media

If you have 50,000 visitors from social media to your blog in one month, the next month you could have 200 or you could have 200,000. It simply is not consistent and predictable. This can make it difficult for selling or buying ads if the site relies heavily on social media. One big month unfortunately doesn’t mean that the blog has turned the corner and that traffic will be lasting. It may or it may not. Of course, if you learn throughout the process, your chances will be much better of maintaining or improving traffic levels.

6 – CPM can be thrown off

If you are trying to calculate the value of your visitors, this can greatly vary depending on what percentage of your visitors are from social media. Visitors that come from social media tend to ignore advertisements, so your click-through rates on AdSense will be lower.

7 – Subscriber numbers may be inflated

If you reach a larger number of visitors in a day with a site like Digg or StumbleUpon, you may see that the next day your subscriber count experienced a big jump. Frequently, it will drop a bit the next day. I’ve learned through experience to expect a percentage of those new subscribers to be gone quickly. This doesn’t always happen, but it can be very disappointing if you’re not prepared for it.

8 – Numbers can’t show impact

Just because a post receives a lot of traffic through social media doesn’t mean that anything has really been accomplished. Hopefully it does have an impact, but visitors alone do not mean much if they never come back, they don’t subscribe, they don’t click on an ad, etc,

What Does This Mean?

1 – You need to know what you want to get out of social media

If you’re using social media to gain exposure and grow your blog, you need to know specifically what it is that you want to accomplish. Without a plan you’ll be left with nothing but some number that really don’t mean anything.

2 – Don’t rely too heavily on social media traffic

Because it’s not consistent, you shouldn’t rely too much on social media. I’m all for optimizing your website or blog for social media and doing what you can to help your chances, but sometimes it just won’t happen. Focus on building diversity in traffic.

3 – Keep trying to improve the results and effectiveness

The learning curve with social media marketing is pretty sharp. By that I mean that you can quickly learn a lot of things that you can immediately put into practice to improve your results. Analyze your results and find the methods that work the best for you in terms of achieving your goals.

4 – Don’t be too quick to judge

Because the numbers can be so deceiving, don’t judge a particular social media site or method of marketing before you’ve given it a fair chance. Don’t give up on a specific social media site because you didn’t become popular the first week you were using the site.

What’s Your Opinion?

How do you feel about the numbers that are involved with social media? Do you agree that they can be very misleading? Why or why not?