Still not convinced you should use social media? Here’s what it can do for your blog traffic:
That spike surprised me when I logged into my statistics yesterday. For some reason — because social media is a lot about making your own luck and a little about magic — a post I wrote in December, Self-Editing: 10 Ways to Tighten Your Copy, went viral on Twitter (or as viral as any of my posts have ever gone, anyhow).
Yet I don’t think the share spell started with Twitter. I think it began with StumbleUpon, a link-sharing site that’s not as well known as Facebook or Twitter but is growing in popularity. I suspect this because that particular post got a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon last week. I’m signed up on the social networking site (here’s my profile if you want to connect) but I rarely use it; someone else stumbled — a.k.a. shared — the post.
Then the sharing caught on via Facebook and Twitter. As of Friday morning, when I wrote this post before going to work (yup, that’s how you grow a blog while working a full-time job), more than 100 people had shared it on Facebook and more than 80 had shared it on Twitter. (That’s a lot for my blog.)
The lesson here: Whether or not you use social media yourself, make information you provide online easy to share. Because even if you’re not into Twitter or Facebook or StumbleUpon, your readers are. And if you provide quality content and accessible share buttons, they’ll pass that content on to their friends.
Wow. That’s great advice. Recently I realized that my “share” buttons were not visible on my home page. Oops. I don’t have many shares outside Twitter and FB, but glad to know if works for some.