A couple of weeks ago I asked you to fill out a short survey. Today I would like to share the results with you. The results were not really a surprise to me, because they are almost an exact representation of the feedback I get from my clients. Unfortunately, it shows to me over and over that most people do not have a social media strategy in place. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a look at the results first.
All of the 27 people who filled out the survey are on Facebook and 71% is on Twitter as well. Half the people in the survey are on Twitter and YouTube and some use StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Digg and other social media sites. None of the participants felt that social media is converting well for them. 60% said that it is somewhat helping and 40% did not see any results from their social media efforts. The little traffic they got, they attributed to Facebook (50%), Twitter (40%), YouTube (28%) and StumbleUpon(28%).
Since this coincides with what my customers tell me when I start out with them, I am familiar with this pattern. I also know that there is a good remedy for it, because social media is one of the easiest ways to get ranked in the search engines and as a result drive traffic to your site. Let me show it to you with an example.
As you probably know, I just started a mastermind group, called the Social Traffic Mastermind. I turned the site live on June 17, now 9 days ago.If you search for the term “social traffic mastermind” (without the quotes), you will see that there are close to 3.5 million pages indexed by Google for this search phrase. So, the competition is definitely there. Nonetheless, all 10 sites that are on page 1 in Google are either pages of my website, or pages referring to my site. In other words, I dominate page one for the key phrase and none of these pages even existed 2 weeks ago. How do you think I managed to do that in such a short period of time?
The answer, of course, is social media! I would never have been able to do this with the traditional SEO. So, what did I do? I used my own strategies. I used social bookmarking to get my pages indexed instantly and I used the social networking sites to spread the word. And I have not even had enough time to start with the video marketing that I have planned. Without a strategy, however, this would not have worked. Had I randomly picked some social bookmarking sites and social networking sites, without giving it more thought, it would not have worked as well, and I would probably have concluded that social media does not work.
Did I use Twitter and Facebook in my promotion. Yes, some, but quite frankly the real reason for the results I have seen, is not because of Facebook and Twitter. And that is where most people spend their time! Let me give you another example. I wrote a blog post for Social Traffic Mastermind that has the title “social media strategies”. I wrote it on June 20, and I used my same social media strategies to see if I could get it ranked. For the purposes of this test I left my blog post as a, so-called, orphan page. This means that the page has no links to it. You can only find it if you have the exact url! You can not find it if you go to my site and try to get there through links. There is none!
Guess what, six days later it is ranked nr 1 in Bing. Google has ranked it under ‘social traffic mastermind’, but not under ‘social media strategies’. So, my social bookmarking strategy did its work, but because it is an orphan page, Google did not rank it anywhere besides as part of my main website. In Bing, on the other hand, it is in the top spot beating 89 million other pages for the search term social media strategies! No surprise to me that Bing ranked it for the search term I have promoted it for, because all I did was use social media to promote this page. There was truly no other way of finding it. This proves that social media can work well and fast! It also proves that Bing is much more focused on social media than Google is. And now that Bing generates 30% of searches in the US, it does have an impact on the traffic to your site.
I hope you realize from this that social media can be highly effective. All it takes is a solid social media strategy to get the results you are looking for. If you have not already done so, grab the social bookmarking strategy that I am giving away for free, so that you can get started. You can find it at the Social Traffic Mastermind. If you want to implement all the social media strategies that I use with my clients you have to join the social media mastermind gold group. But regardless, don’t keep using the social media platforms randomly.
I would love to hear from you if you have a plan in place. Share your views on social media strategies in the comments below. As always, they are much appreciated.
To your success,
