It's time for you to consider developing content specifically to drive traffic from social media sites, and also the time to consider what you want from that social media traffic, and what to do with it once you have it.
1. First off, don’t break the rules! Before you start to market to users,you need to understand the written and unwritten rules of the community and know the communities tolerance for sales promotions and get involved in the social community.
2. With social media, the bottom line is that your campaigns will be more successful if you create content that speaks specifically to the community audience.
3. Before you try to promote your site on digg, the first thing you should know is if your site can handle the traffic of being on the first page (what would 200,000 visitors do to your website server?).
4. The quality of traffic will vary for each social media channel. Sites such as Digg, and Twitter may help you reach a more targeted audience, while StumbleUpon and other niche sites such as Hugg drive non-targeted traffic.
5. If you are a large brand spending a lot of money to develop a ‘viral’ campaign, you may be losing a lot of that money if your content can’t be found. First thing people do for an offline campaign is to search for more information online. 2/3 of searchers are driven to perform a search online as a result of exposure to offline advertisement.
6. If you spent money to develop a viral campaign and it ‘spreads’ via word of mouth, which helps to drive and increased number of searches for your campaign, but you aren’t actually resulting for the main keywords, what went wrong?
In summary, the whole point of social media is engagement, abandoning your community mid campaign will deter the audience from further engagement. Also, it’s not enough to just have traffic, you have to have qualified traffic. In addition, having a call to action and compelling value proposition is key to making your campaigns worthwhile.
