Compass Designs .net

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a popular blog post about “Making Social Media Work”. I used some of those ideas in a presentation at Joomla Day New England (link has audio and video!) about how to use Social Media to get sticky traffic for your site. One recurring question was about Facebook etc buttons.

The hard reality is that putting facebook buttons on your site isn’t going to do much. I used the example of cnn.com only getting a couple of hundred likes on a lead story. For most of us, we don’t have CNN’s traffic, and our buttons just end up un-liked and lonely. So what's a better way to use Facebook?

As I mention in the post and presentation, you need to figure out where your audience lives, what your Social Media Outposts are. For example, at www.compassdesigns.net I have many more people linking to me via twitter than liking me on facebook. It seems in the Joomlaverse, Twitter is more prevalent. A recent site launch we did for a local Nordic Skiing Center got 130 Facebook fans in just 2 weeks. There, the business and the locals in the town are all socially connected through Facebook.

If you simply have to have those Facebook buttons, consider this trick. Don’t use a Joomla extension - these will put a unique Like button on each article and dilute all that social media activity. Rather, go to Facebook and create a Like button widget that links to the root of your site. Then, place that same identical code in a suitable place on all the pages of your site, a module, or use in an article. In this way you’ll be collecting one big “like” for you whole site, which will attract more traction than dividing the attention of your visitors into many individual pages. Its a demonstrated phenomenon that social media buttons don’t have any “hits” make people less likely to be the first.

We have been using this technique with great success with many of our customers at Simplweb. Although they have modest traffic to their small business websites, they are able to leverage the whole site to concentrate their social media traffic to their Facebook page.