Use Sharing Tools to Multiply Site Traffic

Pass-along has been a constant media multiplier for print vehicles. So its not too surprising that pass-along -- now called sharing or share-to-social -- is becoming an audience and traffic multiplier for online media. In a world where you can virtually broadcast something with a click, enabling pass-along can yield incremental direct and search-driven traffic for a tiny investment in time and technology.

In a growing social media universe, passing along a link can become a tactical marketing strategy to drive direct traffic and to enhance a search effort. The trick is targeting the pass-along options so that your audience will recognize the sharing options and use them in context.

MarketingSherpa ran a test with B2B publisher Smartbrief to test the viability of sharing in a B2B environment and to validate the notion of targeting pass-along links to prospect segments. By identifying the networks most relevant to their audience and embedding icons for sharing on each individual article they increased traffic to their sites from 1351% coming from Facebook to 2070% coming from LinkedIn. 

Keep in mind that mass sharing sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious already have massive audiences and have significant search advantages for driving added traffic. Making your content even easier to share will offer you options to intersect customers and prospects open to your brand in unexpected ways. 

Here's what you have to do to leverage this learning:

1. Identify the content you want to be passed along.

2. Structure where you want to direct traffic to. In the same case traffic was directed to article summaries rather than directly to content assets. 

3. Identify the social sites most used and relevant to your target audience.

4. Test a few at first to gauge pass-along and validate audience appeal.

5. Embed the icons and links from the social sites on each element of content

6. Enable users to e-mail content to friends as well

7. Measure inbound traffic from each source and outbound e-mails

8. Adjust and tweak based on results

 

Comments

[Enrique]

Hi. I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.
I am from Myanmar and also now am reading in English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Back inside the bow, they sex to and stop day discs which even vary forge the perception of general highs."

Thank you so much for your future answers :o. Enrique.