The Psychology Behind Traffic From Social Media Sites
Social Media sites play a huge role in keeping the breath to our blogs. Whether you like to hear it or not, psychology does play a big part in bringing traffic from these sites. Some people prefer to call it strategy, but the end result is the same. Manipulating people with word play, to direct them toward your blog, where they will perform some sort of action.
I’ll get to the whole psychology of social media in a second, but for right now I still want to stand behind what I have always said. Build relationships!
When you are an authority figure, you don’t really have to worry about driving traffic. Having successfully built your brand, your readers will follow you off the edge of a cliff if need be, however, most people have not made it that far yet and I want to show you something cool that will really boost interaction and help you with getting to know more people.
Social Media Sites for Interaction
Social Media Examiner
A few months before I made the final cut for Social Media Examiner’s Top Ten Social Media Blogs of 2016 I found some of my friends’ site.
The way you can benefit from this site is what I’ve been preaching forever. It’s just another great way for you to interact with other bloggers and social media experts and can really improve your reach and sociability online.The content notwithstanding, it’s awesome and can really help you understand more about social media, but the owner, Michael Stelzner, has created a free community that goes along with this blog.
They have 3 different groups that you can join:
Blogging – In the blogging group, you will find popular bloggers such as Kristi Hines of Kikolani.com and Ileane Smith of Basic Blog Tips. It really is a great place to discuss different blogging strategies and another way to open up another door for the traffic to come rolling in to your site.
Facebook – This is the second group that they have to offer. Even though I don’t understand why they just didn’t create a “social media” group, the Facebook group is really directed towards different social strategies for this awesome giant. People are willing to connect and speak of various subjects all related to Facebook.
Small Business – To be honest with you, I haven’t even had enough time, with joining the Facebook and Blogging groups, to even take a look at this group. The information that I get from these two groups keeps me busy enough that I basically am prevented from branching out to the small business group. However, if this group is as effective as the other two, I can almost guarantee that you are going to benefit from it.
You must realize that a lot of the people on SME are experienced bloggers or social media nuts of some type and they have already grasped the idea of what creating contacts can do for your business. When I joined, I immediately made friends…and it wasn’t anything I did, it was because of the people reaching out to me. (Which has been a first in my career).
For people like me, social networking is the only route to take. Having to rely on my skills as an SEO guru would just end up embarrassing myself. However, I prefer to build my clientele through social networking. It’s much easier, and it’s faster too!
It’s a common mistake that after you write a post, you share that post to Twitter, then Google+, then Facebook, etc. But ask yourself, after that, after all of those shares and the attempts at driving traffic to your website from social media, what next?
What are your plans for promotion? What are your plans for marketing that content to get traffic?
My friend Matt Rosser wrote a very interesting guest post the other day about some content marketing sites that you can use to build traffic, and I would like to take it one step further and detail some little things I see that are missing in some of the blogs I have been reading as of late.
The Psychology of Social Media Sites
You have to ask yourself: what are people looking for on social media sites? A lot of them are searching for content that will touch them in some sort of way. When you can create a reaction to a reader, then, congratulation, you have just performed a psychological effect on someone.
Always remember to bring content that involves and engages the reader, especially on a personal level. Some kind of something that provides a reaction on their part.
There are a couple of “strategies” that you can implement on social media sites that almost everyone will react to:
Acknowledgement- Let’s face it, people want to be mentioned. Especially when you are praising them for something they have done, may it be a great blog post, or just to mention them in some way. I know how I feel when someone tags me on social media, after sharing my posts, and tells everyone how great it was! Not only does this make them feel good, it also includes them in the social discussion and makes them feel part of something special that’s going on.
Pay Them Attention- This is also true for just about everyone, and I guess you can say that this is basically the same thing as acknowledgement, but when you acknowledge someone, you’re not formally talking to them, but rather AT them. When you pay someone attention, you are one-on-one with that person, meeting their needs, or just talking to them. This is where most people fall short in their psychology/strategy because a lot of people feel that this is just too time consuming.
Appreciation- My favorite thing. The best part about this is you can appreciate someone by acknowledging them AND paying them attention at the same time. This is how I met one of the most popular bloggers online, by consistently sharing posts from them, and then finally asking them for some sort of help. After it was all over, I had met a great confidant and ally! Appreciation is easy when it comes down to something like this.
Since social media is still fairly new, people are starting to use it more and more for their businesses or blogs. It’s not really certain how psychological word play affects people online, but we know that it does, and can, boost your integrity on these platforms.
Psychological Affect of Word-Play
What would you do if I had a product that would guarantee you 1,000 visitors to your blog, but I can only sell 100 of them?
Forget about it! You would purchase, wouldn’t you?
Taking things away from the reader on these sites is a great way to get someone to perform action. In my experience, when people see something good, but there’s a chance that they may not get it, they usually rush to get it before someone else does.
Which takes into account another aspect of the psyche of the reader…
They’re greedy.
Writing great posts is just part of the job, but when you can implement some psychological word-play into the mix in your social media updates, you are going to see a bigger result in your traffic.
Why Your Traffic May Be Lacking on Social Media Sites
So social media should be the easiest place to get your traffic. However, there are still people suffering. Millions of people passing by their updates and links only to scroll to the next one.
Why is that?
You’re Title Isn’t Working
Speaking with social media traffic in mind, it doesn’t matter how strong your blog post is, if your title doesn’t grab them on these platforms, then let’s face it, they aren’t coming.
You can find multiple posts on the Google search engine that relates to “how to write catchy titles”, but as a post on Copyblogger says, you have to build authority for yourself before anyone will listen.
How do you do this when there are millions of bloggers just like you screaming the same thing? The way you capture authority with your audience is to scream louder, right?
What I mean is that you need to basically re-invent the wheel all over again, except build it on your specifications. Drive something home that you can be proud of and stop following the masses.
Different authority figures that blog are easy to spot because they’re the one’s with 500 social shares. They have their audience, so it doesn’t matter whether or not their titles are catchy. People already know that their content is amazing. They have built a fortress of content around a stronghold of content that will stand any scrutiny…
Assuming that your content is “scrutiny-worthy”, the only thing left is bringing the visitor from those social media sites, and having a catchy title is the first step in doing this. Bring some “sham-wow” to the table and re-invent the way you reach out to your social media friends.
You Haven’t Established Yourself
As with anything, building a community of readers takes a lot of time to do. Building on the psychological strategies as listed above will go a long way to help you build more relationships and trust with new readers.
Tom is a full-time digital marketer who has practiced internet marketing for over 10 years. Tom also serves dozens of local digital businesses and has successfully brought substantial traffic growth to their websites.
The way you can benefit from this site is what I’ve been preaching forever. It’s just another great way for you to interact with other bloggers and social media experts and can really improve your reach and sociability online.The content notwithstanding, it’s awesome and can really help you understand more about social media, but the owner, Michael Stelzner, has created a free community that goes along with this blog.
You have to ask yourself: what are people looking for on social media sites? A lot of them are searching for content that will touch them in some sort of way. When you can create a reaction to a reader, then, congratulation, you have just performed a psychological effect on someone.
Why is that?
