Done writing quality content for today. Enough of blog commenting for the day. Tired of the long discussions in today’s forum topic. What now? Well, there’s one big thing you’re missing. They call it the Social Media. This article is the final article for this series and all it talks about is the genuine way of generating traffic from social media. Without any further ado, let’s first take a look at the major (widely used amongst bloggers and site owners) social networking sites that are proven to bring a lot of traffic provided the other required factors (discussed later) are fulfilled.

1)      Facebook

2)      Twitter

3)      Google+

4)      LinkedIn

5)      Pinterest

The list might have missed out your favorite social networking site, but note that we are discussing about traffic. There are several social bookmarking sites out there, which are usually used for SEO purposes (building backlinks).

Let’s discuss the importance of each of the above-mentioned sites.

Traffic From Social Media – A Short Guide

Stated and proven by thousands of site owners – Social media has always been a great traffic source especially if the niche is something that attracts the general audience. But what role do the social networking sites play at an individual level?

Facebook – Millions consider it as a second home. Facebook is currently being used by people in the range of 7-70 year olds. The number of different devices that allow the use of the same is huge. This makes it more comfortable to use. In those millions is an abundant number of bloggers and site owners who intend to generate quality traffic from the network, and are often successful in doing so. Traffic, from Facebook, usually gets driven in the following ways –

• Shared Links From Profile
• Shared Links From Pages
• Shared Links Privately (PM)
• Shared Links In Groups
• Paid Advertising

All these features can be used by any account on the site. But to make it a success, one either needs to have a great number of ‘friends’ in the niche of the site, a good number of ‘fans’ on the pages who’re interested in the content, participate in groups which consists of members from the same niche, or be able to pay for the advertisements.

Twitter – The second best social networking site, but that which limits sharing to 140 characters per ‘tweet’. The tweet can contain links to the site and hence traffic can be driven from the same.

To be successful in driving immense traffic from Twitter, one needs to have a large amount of ‘followers’ consisting a great number of people from the same niche, or interested in the same niche the site is.

Google+ – It is consistently rising its reputation especially after site owners and bloggers discovered that the more number of shares on Google, the higher possibility of better ranking.

As a traffic source, it has been working great for many who’ve got a god number of followers on the network. It pretty much works like Facebook, though.

LinkedIn – Here, the traffic tends to increase with the networking of the profile. The more friends and engagement a profile has, the better traffic it can drive to the site.

LinkedIn also works similar to Facebook and Google+, but has one feature that the other two don’t – the feature of tracking the ‘profile views’. A user can see how many times his/her profile is viewed, and the profile is the place where blog/site links are entered.

Pinterest – Pinterest is not so old in town, but has yet attracted hundreds of thousands of users. The site is basically for sharing photos, along with the link to the article from which the picture is ‘pinned’. Hence, some good traffic can be generated provided that the ‘board’ where the pictures are pinned is very relevant to the article.

Conclusion

In the coming year of 2013, it is obvious that the current social media statistics are definitely going to rise further. The rise clearly evidences that an upsurge in the traffic, regardless of the niche, is definitely en route.

Winding Up

As the series was all about generating traffic, four effectual sources were discussed and it was concluded that if followed the correct path, traffic should flow in like water. All it requires from you is hard-work, determination, dedication, will-power and the hardest thing to have – patience.