This post is taken from my other site: bbAuthority
No way? Yes way! How many of you actually use Social Media for your advantage? Not many I bet.
How do I use it to help my forum?
You can use it in a number of ways, I actually can’t list them all as people will use social networks and social media sites differently. You can easily optimize your profile with a few links to your site, maybe a few pages and then start making friends, lots of friends. Comment on their profiles, look at their interests etc. and if they use forums then message them about yours (this is especially effective if you own a promotion board as they are in the exact same boat as you).
Once you build (or have built) a good network ‘hub’ on the big sites, you can start to branch out onto smaller networks, submit articles to Digg, tweet with Twitter and comment on blogs. “But blogs aren’t social media sites or networks Rich!”, this is true but what you have to remember is once people start commenting on blog posts they leave marks with links to their blogs, then they have links on their posts to other blogs from commenter’s. This process gradually grows in size until you come across maybe 100 blogs you have never heard of that are fairly popular or (even better) cover your forum theme.
You can just keep enlarging your horizons on advertising, promotion and commenting while your site gets larger. With having a steady rise of links as your forum grows in size, it should accommodate the increase in demand for more traffic, while catering for the visitor’s needs with a wider variety of content.
Why should I use it?
The main big bonus (and that’s a Brucey bonus!) for using Social Media in promoting your forum is traffic, lot’s of traffic. Remember the games where you can link up score multipliers?
Think of promoting on Social Media (using correct and effective practices) as a bonus multiplier of a million. “That can’t be right Rich, a million would get me so much traffic!”, well that is true, maybe not a million but you catch my drift. So why are you sitting around and not jumping on this bandwagon of traffic miners? Think of how many hits you could get on your Facebook or MySpace profiles alone, they average millions of visits per day.
Are there any disadvantages?
The only disadvantages are the most obvious, if you have already started your SEO homework and have got a comfortable knowledge of what to do. Some of you may find disadvantages as follows:
- It may get extremely fustrating, if no traffic goes to your site or if you are targeting the wrong audience.
- It can get very dull and boring, being active on other people’s blogs, on media profiles etc. can get a bit repetitive.
- It is (or should be) a long process, I am not talking about over night stuff here guys, you need to be in for the long run.
- If done obviously, ’spam’ like, using robots or any other black hat or techniques, you could damage your site or even worse, get the ol’ Google punishment.
Other than the above listed, you should be fine with Social Media promotion in the long run along side your forum. If you are serious enough on gettign a successful community under your belt, start it all off, get the ball rolling and you should find some hope at the end of the tunnel.
One last thing: If you can, do yourself a favour and install Google Analytics on your forum.
/Rich
