Social media is now a big part of the web, and thankfully ecommerce websites can take advantage of it. Social networking is a much more popular activity then social bookmarking services but all are still worth utilising.
Benefits
Not only will they give you bursts of traffic but they can also help build inbound links, some of which will help your SEO campaign. Although time is required to maximise the potential of these services it is completely free.
Limitations
The nature of social media means bursts of traffic will be very short lived, so one day you could get 1,000 visitors from a great article which has became popular on stumbleupon, the next day you could get 5 visitors. Visitors from social media sites traditionally don’t convert as well as more targetted visitors from search engines – so chuck your 1.5% conversion rate target out the window for social media traffic.
Weighing Up The Pros and Cons
All-in-all I am a big fan of social media and think it is worthwhile using it to increase traffic and inbound links to your ecommerce website, despite the limitations. It is also a rapidly growing sector of the web so it is good to get involved now as who knows how much it will grow.
Integrating Into Your Website
You can start by joining services such as digg, stumbleupon and reddit to begin building links. Remember to use the services properly though, submit quality content and become an active member of the community, spam will get you nowhere over the long-term (apart from give you a terrible reputation).
You can also add buttons to your website so visitors can bookmark your pages on sites like delicious, and submit pages to social media sites. Services like addthis are a good one to use because the button can take up very little space but has lots of functions.
You could also start to use twitter, although I would use this more as an individual to build up business contacts rather then promote your ecommerce website to potential customers.
Conclusion
If you want to start increasing traffic via social media then get together a full plan of how you are going to harness it effectively, but also in an ethical way (IE not spamming, being a genuine member of the services). And also how you want the social media buttons on your website to work and have an effect. As with an aspect of your business approach it properly and professionally with a decent plan and you can have a good crack at it.
1 Comment Posted
I using twitter and social bookmarking is great advice.
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