My Social Network Profile
Posted on October 18, 2007 - Filed Under Social Networks
Over the past year, I have not really explored social networking as the concept is a little hard to grasp for someone who’s been working with search engines and corporate sites. However, I can no longer ignore its existence and curiousity gets ahead of me - why would a social networking site like Digg attract 20 million (loyal) visitors a month, when corporate websites struggle to attract over 2 million returning visitors to its site? Why would people want to blog anywhere else than on their own site? And why would they want to go to a site to store their favourite websites / weblogs when they could simply use the “Favourite” function on their web browser? After following some other weblogs and their success, I have come to realise that the answer lies in two magic words: Visibility and Traffic.
To understand the dynamics of social networking, you have to first understand what it is. Internet social networks are online communities of people who post various types of news and articles onto a website that is relevant to the community. So, instead of spending hours on the internet searching for interesting news that would add to my knowledge about a particular topic I’m interested in knowing more about, I would simply go to one of these communities where the members have the same interests as I do, and post whatever they found on the World Wide Web onto the site or better yet - some of them are actually masters in the field who would post their own articles onto the site. Now, I can simply log on to the social network I belong to and do a search with a few keywords, and find tons of articles within minutes that I could read. As the articles are ranked according to community votes, I can also choose a particular category (technical, health, entertainment, etc.) and read the top articles from there. Better yet, if I find a particular member who regularly submit articles that I enjoy reading, I can “subscribe” to all the articles / submissions he posts into the community site. By participating in the comments and discussions attached to each article, I can also make myself visible to the community, and add friends who may become fans of my articles as well.
While the above are benefits for the user who is interested in writing / reading articles for information, the other more lucrative advantage is that it can bring your website / weblog out of hit rate oblivion to become a high ranking search engine site. Without social networks, attracting traffic to your site can be a slow and even tedious process if you are unfamiliar with SEO (Search Engine Optimizations), internet marketing know how, and Google Ads targetting. Using a social network however, you can get your site noticed within seconds of submitting an article that will be devoured by members. By simply putting up a post on your blog and submitting it into a social networking community where you have some sort of influence over, your social network fans and buddies will soon be swarming all over your site and putting their vote to it, which further raises the visibility of your post in the social networking site, attracting even more visitors to your site.
The key is to either become an influencer, or the friend of an influencer, within the social networking community you are participating in. All you need to do is to consistently submit highly informative / impacting posts to a particular social networking community (Digg, Technorati, Newsvine, etc.) and get people to vote for your article. In addition, you need to create goodwill and visibility by making positive comments to articles that others have posted (thanking them, letting them know how interesting you found it, and even voting for it), and to provide them with useful sites / blogs that they can use to write about. When you do this effectively and consistently, you will raise your profile in the community, and very soon you will build your very own fan club. As your profile rises higher, so will your website / weblog. And that is a sure way to drive consistent traffic to your site in a very quick time, as compared to leaving yourself to the mercy of search engines.
At the end of the day, while investing in relationships within the social community is important, you still have to remember that it is always content, content and content that will ultimately earn you loyal readers and subscribers to your blog.
If you think you are interested in exploring social networking, join me at the following social networks. Better yet, if you’re already a member of any of the following, favourite me / add me as a friend:
For a complete list of social networks on the internet, click here.
If you think this article will make a good submission to your social networking community, click on the relevant networking icon in the post below.
Don't miss any of my posts by
subscribing to my feed!
Comments
Leave a Reply
