What is an effective social media strategy for promoting a website?

An effective social media strategy is one that ends up bearing long term benefits from Q&A sites, social media sites, forums, etc.

Depending on the social media strategy that you use, your site or blog could get a tremendous amount of traffic or an anemic, but still better than nothing exposure.

A lot of social media consultants apply a multi-pronged social media strategy in helping their clients promote their website and increase site exposure.

Here at MarketConsensus, we use the same type of multi-pronged strategy, and it has allowed us to effectively promote our site and increase our traffic.

effective social media strategy for promoting a website

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Multi-pronged social media strategy

  1. Have an active presence on the main social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit)
  2. Expand your reach and promote your website to less mainstream social media sites (i.e., Tumblr, Squidoo)
  3. Participate in Q&A Sites (LinkedIn Q&A, Quora, Yahoo Answers, etc.)
  4. Actively engage other blogs / forums (commenting, building connections, spreading awareness of your website)

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1. Have an active presence on mainstream social media sites

Ensure that you have created a Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profile for your startup, blog and business. This should be different from your regular personal profile.

In addition to having a profile, we recommend that you become an active participant on these social media sites. LinkedIn has a lot of groups and you can find one that is related to your niche. Join or start a discussion. Same goes for Facebook.

2. Expand your reach and promote your website to less mainstream social media sites

Because everyone else is also using Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn to promote their blog or website, you'll want to expand your presence on less mainstream social media sites like Squidoo and Tumblr. This should be one of the various prongs of your social media strategy.

At the bottom of this post is a list of social media and blog sites that you can be actively engaged in. I wouldn’t recommend you to join all sites. Select five that have a strong community of users that you are interested in and concentrate on these.

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3. Participate in Q&A Sites

On a daily basis, thousands of questions are posted on popular Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers, Ask.com, Quora.com, and LinkedIn Ask. An effective social media strategy includes promoting your website on such Q&A sites.

Concentrate on answering high quality questions that are related to content on your blog. Also, you’ll want to focus on new questions or those that do not have a lot of responses.

As more users review such questions, they'll normally review the answers already provided (yours included) before they add their own response. However, a lot of viewers that visit these Q&A site do not leave responses. They tend to just review questions that are of interest to them and also the answers provided.

Such viewers are your primary target. Being that they are just reading and passing through, they are more likely to click on your link if your response is enlightening enough. It helps if you have structured your answer in such a way as to make people want to click and visit your site to learn more.

However, you need to be authentic in your response, especially if you are including your website address. Just leaving your URL on the response / reply field will quickly get you tagged for spamming. Using tact and being helpful with your responses can earn you a great following.

4. Be an active participant on other blogs / forums

Leave constructive comments. If you’re already reading them, it only takes a few seconds to leave a comment. You normally have an option to include your URL as part of your profile. Make sure that you take advantage of this feature. Users will sometimes click on your URL to visit your site.

Sample List of Social Media and Blog Sites

  1. AngelList
  2. Apps400
  3. CrunchBase
  4. Digg
  5. Killerstartups
  6. Lifehacker
  7. Mashable
  8. Rate My Startup
  9. ReadWrite
  10. Reddit
  11. The Next Web
  12. Venture Beat

Know of any other social media strategies that should be included on this list? Let us know in the comments section below.