Social Media Priorities Funnel

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Last week I published a Blogging Priorities Funnel and asked my readers whether they would be interested in additional funnels. Many expressed an interest in traffic driving priorities funnels so this is the first of many where I share my priorities for driving traffic.

Table of contents

Note that the most important priority on any funnel is at the bottom so start there and work your way up.

TWITTER:

I rank Twitter first because:

A Twitter username is a shorthand way for others to share how to reach you, more information about you, and your most important link. If I want to mention you in a comment and don’t know if a link is acceptable on that site (or maybe I KNOW they won’t approve a link) I can simply use @YourUserName to recommend you.
Twitter is where influencers connect with each other and how we can send visibility for a specific link or topic between influencers. It is usually how I will ask someone to meet me on Skype or IM or call me and others who, like me, have overflowing email inboxes are far easier to connect with live on Twitter than anywhere else (except Skype or IM – and we use Twitter to make that direct connection).

Whether you have never even seen Twitter or are an experienced user you can use my Twitter Best Practices post to make your time spent their more effective.

TWELLOW:

Use Twellow to quickly identify and follow the specific audience you want to reach. See How to Use Twellow (linked from the Twitter Best Practices post mentioned above) and Geo-targeting Twitter. Also do this: Strategy for getting more Twitter followers interested in YOUR niche.

TWITTERFEED:

Feeding top content related to your niche directly into your Twitter account is the best way to grow your influence and maintain a consistent presence on Twitter which is essential to growing your influence there. You’ll never have to worry about being unfollowed because you’ve been too busy for any reason to sign into Twitter.

No that does NOT mean I recommend you not actually USE Twitter regularly – only that during times when you can’t be online (when you have a family emergency, are working on a major project, or are traveling) that your Twitter account will not be dormant.

See How to Use Twitterfeed for a consistent Twitter presence.

STUMBLEUPON:

StumbleUpon can drive a lot of traffic IF you know how to use it effectively. That includes first thumbing up what you want to share and then taking the time to write a short review. Adding an image can attract more clicks. Like any other social media site the more you use it the more powerful it becomes.

I use an unusual strategy to make the most of my time online. When I want to share your post and send you more visitors than Twitter alone can, I write a Twitter length review on StumbleUpon that includes your Twitter username. That review is automatically fed to Twitter and Facebook and pulled in via RSS to FriendFeed.

If I want to really maximize who sees your post I will also manually add it to Facebook and Friendfeed and include an image – something that as of the past few days is no longer as simple as using the Share on Facebook or Share on FriendFeed tools. I noticed this over the weekend:

The option to share images has disappeared from both
Share on Facebook and Share on FriendFeed.

The workaround is to download the image to your hard drive and upload it manually! Facebook and FriendFeed are acting to make it harder to use their sites to share images that call attention to what you wish to promote – whether that is a blog, a good cause, or a small business.

If a cause, event or post is exceptional I will take the time to schedule additional tweets using StumbleUpon’s shortener su.pr. See how to use su.pr.

While StumbleUpon is not as powerful for driving traffic today as it was back in 2007 when I sent 25,000 Visitors from StumbleUpon to one blog post, it is still one of the larger sources of traffic available and it is easy to consistently send 50-200 visitors (depending on your Twitter reach) using su.pr.

SOCIAL MEDIA TIP: Include Twitter length sound bites
in your posts and you will get tweeted more often.
Posts with multiple key points that fit on Twitter = more scheduled tweets!

Excellent quotes are also quoted more often in posts and the media.

FACEBOOK:

We all know Facebook is used by the masses so we have to be there, but that site has so many usability problems it drives people like me to distraction to use it. I force myself to go there and I feed some content there and share some manually, but I am definitely no expert on Facebook. However, I do know some Facebook experts: I can strongly recommend:

Kimberly Canterbury ~ @AskKim on Twitter ~ Kim has an extensive Optimizing Facebook category and offers a Facebook for Business Made Easy ebook
Ron Cripps ~ @AffiliateXFiles ~ Ron has an extensive Facebook Optimization category and offers Facebook How-to Videos
Ching Ya ~ @?wchinya on Facebook Customization

FRIENDFEED:

When I first started this blog I was extremely active on FriendFeed – until they sold out. Like any social network, if you are not active there regularly and personally you will get less attention and traffic from that source. I pop into FriendFeed off and on but not consistently these days and as I mentioned in the StumbleUpon (SU) section I pull my SU feed into my FriendFeed account.

Because I am not physically there very much any more it is not nearly as effective as it once was; however, I did share a link for these very unusual stone candles yesterday and almost immediately got four likes on that share so FriendFeed is still a viable option. We all must decide where to focus our time and unfortunately right now FriendFeed is not highest on my priority list.

LINKEDIN:

LinkedIn is extremely important for many businesses and would be a much higher priority for them (and me) IF they or I :

Were seeking employment.
Was involved in an industry that is highly impressed by higher education credentials or having worked for a specific company.
Desired connections with CEOs, COOs and other executives or consultants who work with Fortune 100 / 500 /1000 corporations.

The groups and question and answer sections on LinkedIn can be very useful for increasing your visibility and identifying others. If LinkedIn is one of your highest priorities, be sure to connect with Irene Koehler ~ @IreneKoehler ~ and consider LinkedIn Profile Optimization.

Be sure to fill out your profile there and start getting recommendations. (I still need to do that on my own LinkedIn profile so do as I say and not as I’ve done so far!) Do check out what I put in the Honors and Awards section for ideas to populate your own. That is where you can share when you are singled out for recognition so that others who look at your profile will know more about your strengths.

QUORA:

Launched to a ton of buzz and heavily used by many influential social media marketers, Quora is clearly serious about being important. The only reason it is so far down my list of priorities is lack of time. I have used it intermittently and will use it more consistently as time allows.

Several bloggers I can highly recommend have written about Quora so visit their blogs for more details:

Louis Gray ~ @louisgray ~ on Marketing on Quora – Louis has many posts about Quora so see his Quora Information category for much more.
Adam Singer ~ @futurebuzz ~ on Using Quora for Long Tail Traffic

iTweetLive:

If you have a business or are interested in marketing anything on Twitter you will want to check out iTweetLive ~ @iTweetLive ~ as a way to respond to keyword triggered alerts. You can manually reply to them or use their system to send pre-written tweets. I haven’t played with this in a while but it had major potential – especially if they would allow you to select from among your canned tweets to send the one most relevant to a particular tweet.

This video explains how it works: