Clicksharp Marketing

Social media works in funny ways. Often times, you’ll know when some shred of your content strikes a viral nerve, because you’ll wake up, check your website analytics data…and see a 1000% leap in your traffic.

Behold this recent illustration by Elliance:

Assume that each of the four inputs (press release, blog posting, link bait, and video posting) are interchangeable. It doesn’t really matter in what order you do them, and each can make a big splash in their own right.

But prominent placement on a social media site doesn’t usually last very long… so the next day, you come crashing back down. But look more closely and you’ll find that more often than not, you’re not back to square one. You’re getting more pageviews (total pages viewed on your site) or more absolute visits than before the spike.

This leads to two questions:

1) What did I do to get such a huge boost in visitors? That is a topic which could be discussed for years on end–but if you’re really eager to learn, read up on social media on the internet.

2) Why am I doing better now in the aftermath?

This one can be answered a bit more directly, with help from a snapshot of traffic to the Clicksharp Small Business blog, spanning late December and early January:

The post entitled “Social Networking: A New Generation Of Business Development” became very popular on a particular social bookmarking site. The snowballing popularity is reflected in the sharp upward curve, which died down after newer content took its place. But if this content has become a distant memory, then why in the week after, is the Clicksharp blog still getting more traffic than it was a week prior?

The post-viral euphoria happens for a few reasons:

1. During that period of popularity, more people are likely to cite your content within their own content (much like the Elliance graphic I used above). These “re-posts” won’t necessarily disappear from the front line as quickly as the original, and give others a vehicle to get back to you.
2. Apart from driving referral traffic, the inbound links that remain in the wake of your viral joyride also boost your popularity with search engines, giving you higher rankings for keywords you already compete on… and introducing you to the fray with brand new ones.
3. Some truly dedicated people do continue to dig beneath the surface, past “what’s hot” and into the guts of these social media sites.

Moral of the story: one-hit wonders still have more going for them than just that one hit. You’ll usually come crashing down at some point, but the landing is softer than you may realize.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 @ 9:53 pm on the category Link building, SEO, Small business, Social media, Viral marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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