Setting up and curating your social media profiles is just as important as tending to your own website and blog. If we can use the analogy that our blog is a beautiful house in which we conduct our business and make money, take a quick look around the perimeter of your house. Wouldn’t it be great to have a flourishing garden as well?
When we have an attractive garden, more customers will want to get a closer look at our house. That’s what we want, right? Our house is where we make our money, so our house needs to look attractive to potential customers and so does the garden.
Add Value With A Social Media Garden
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In my garden, I like to have a few big trees and a few extra smaller plants dotted around. I call one of my big trees Twitter and the other Facebook. I call my smaller plants Tumblr, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn (amongst others).
Many businesses focus solely on their own house (their website) and neglect the garden (social media). Lift your chin and take a look around. If you’re not participating in social media, it’s like you’ve built a brick wall around your property making it more difficult for customers to take a look inside.
Let’s tie up this analogy by seeding our garden lawn. I don’t know about you, but when I see a beautiful well-manicured lawn, I tend to admire it for a little while longer than I would usually give grass credit for. Likewise, in social media circles, our garden lawn needs to provide similar value to visitors that you find through the network.
Our garden lawn comes in the form of blog posts, with new blades of grass popping up a couple of times a week, give or take.
Curate A Well-Manicured Lawn
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I’m likening our blog to a garden lawn because it takes time to grow and mature. The lawn spreads out between the trees and plants making the garden one coherent entity. We want each blade of grass to be luscious and green with a complete absence of weeds.
It’s a mighty fine picture we’re painting here but let’s put the analogy to bed and wrap this up.
The great thing about blogs is that they fit perfectly with social networks because each post can be shared easily. Adding new posts regularly provides value to the reader and will provide traffic to your website as long as each post contains sharable content that the social networks love.
Our social media garden has a few big areas of focus, such as our Twitter and Facebook profiles. For yourself, it might be a YouTube channel or Pinterest. These “big trees” stand tall as a beacon for our website, which is our primary place of business.
Our social media garden also consists of smaller “plants” that you may not focus too much of your attention, but it’s a good idea to let them grow organically.
Automate Your Blog To Grow Your Social Media Garden
I use a WordPress plugin called Social Networks Auto Poster that automatically submits all new blog posts to a dozen social networks including:
- Google Plus
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- Blogger
- Delicious
- … and others
We’re generating traffic to Inscribd through these social networks without lifting a finger. That’s because we’ve automated a large part of our social media strategy and I highly recommend bloggers do the same. Having said that, I do lift a finger for my “big trees” and try to participate on those networks to interact with our readers.
Just like a garden needs time to mature, so do your social media profiles. Plant a few seeds and watch your traffic numbers grow.
Which social network refers the most traffic to your website?
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