March 19, 2007 at 1:39 pm
How to generate traffic using social networks
How do you use the engaged, attentive audiences on existing social networks such as YouTube in order to drive traffic to your own content?
Lonelygirl15, a YouTube user, gave us a case study of how to do it. The actress for an alternate reality game garnered a wide following on YouTube by following these simple steps:
1. lonelygirl15 began began ‘friending’ other youtube users (creating “her” own social network.)
2. lonelygirl15 next began to seek out popular videos and began commenting on them with regularity (creating name-recognition among an even broader audience of those who are viewing these popular videos.
3. lonelygirl15 began posting her own videos and her friends began posting responses and the masses who view popular videos linked through to her after reading her previous comments…the rest is history….huge traffic and a loyal fan-base.
- Marc Levin, Senior Marketing Manager, Yahoo! Publisher Network Group, reporting on SXSWi session LonelyGirl15 on his blog dogballs
So how can alt papers put LonelyGirl15 strategies to work for them?
1. Create online presences with authentic voices.
2. Use your online presences (MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr) to interact regularly and meaningfully with real people. Post comments on their pages and content.
3. Link to your content contextually on other people’s sites. Posted a comment about politics? Send them a targeted link to a recent story.
[More about the LonelyGirl15 phenomenon.]
How does your paper drive traffic using social networks?
Tags: social networks, traffic
Steve Shanafelt:
March 21, 2007 at 4:51 pm
We use MySpace to help promote our own traffic numbers through the use of bulletins. If we have a juicy blog or something, we’ll write up a MySpace bulletin with a teaser, then send it out with a link back to the story. Also, we run “mega-updates” each week, which is little more than the table of contents formatted in HTML. It’s pretty effective, though, and we often see spikes in our traffic coming directly from those MySpace bulletins.
We also hold a weekly (usually) Battle of the Bands, which asks people to vote on their favorite local band on MySpace. The prize is that we add the band to our “Top Friends” for the week, and add one of their songs as our featured music. We also occasionally feature the winner in a short blog interview.
When we were testing out our new blogs and layout, we asked our MySpace friends to give us feedback on it. We got very few responses, but those who did write us said some very useful things.
We also use it as a way of keeping in touch with readers, as a fair amount of people message us about how to get their event covered in the print edition.
So, to sum up, we use MySpace much like a band would: to promote ourselves.
– Steve Shanafelt
A&E Reporter
Mountain Xpress