Ever since search engines have started including “social media impact” in their SERPs {early 2010}, the race of creating social buzz has increased. Many people/companies {big ones as well} have started buying followers and fans to gain the SEO advantage.
But, the big question is : Does it really help in improving SERPs? Should you also buy twitter followers or Facebook fans? Will it help in creating social buzz about your website? Will it help in increasing traffic on your site?
Since these are a lot of questions, I’ll take them one by one. But if you’re interested in reading my opinion on this, here you go:
My Take: If you’re buying FB fans and Twitter followers by more authentic means like paying people for tweeting up your new product/website, you might be able to create the buzz and get some followers to your profile and fan page. Always remember its more important to create a buzz on social networks { metrics: Facebook insight console shows number of people talking about your page.. } than merely having numbers. So, you should not be buying numbers but look for getting active followers. Active followers are the targetted traffic you’re looking for because they have higher conversion rates. There are some very popular sites which will help you in getting more followers, Fiver, Buysellads….
Note : Fact: Social media referrals (also known as viral traffic ) in ecommerce industry have a conversion rate which is approx 4-6 times higher than site average conversion rate.
So, if you have to increase your sales, getting popular in social media is the right step but don’t forget the ultimate goal, “Generating more revenue”.
QnA
Does this help in improving your search engine ranking?
Yes, being popular in Social media does helps in improving the search engine rankings. Since it sends highly relevant and targeted traffic, Google and other search engines therefore have a very high regard for socially popular links and websites. Since, nowadays social networking sites have become an important tool for gaining visibility, updating upcoming stuff about your website and most importantly creating a brand awareness about your business.
Should you also buy twitter followers or Facebook fans? Will it help in creating social buzz about your website?
Well, buying pure vanilla fans won’t help. As per Matt Cutts, quality matters a lot. What will you do after buying fans for your Facebook page, there won’t be any activity or discussion from the purchased fans. What matters most is what happens after tweets or posts on your Facebook pages. Were you successful in grabbing attention ? Did your visitors liked it?
Will it help in increasing traffic on your site?
Yes yes and yes…Social networks provide highly targeted traffic which creates a viral effect and thereby more people landing to your website to see same awesome stuff which you created and someone shared.
Here is an example from my own blog post at VibeThemes which i posted on my Facebook page.It was written in April was read by more than 900 visitors on Facebook and it created a viral of 19 i.e. 19 people read it from someone else’s page. This is the power of social media. Have a look at the screenshot and you will understand yourself.
Same is the case with Twitter. Twitter can help you in forming a chain of reaction. Let us suppose you tweet about an upcoming contest on your site and someone following you, sitting miles from you retweets about the contest.The tweet which was originally posted to your followers is now visible to his/her followers who retweeted it.
Social media like Facebook , Twitter has evolved by leaps and bounds in the last decade and we are totally unaware where are we heading to? What will happen to social media in the coming decade?
In my opinion social media is and has always been important to you and your company. Engage in conversations, build a followership, establish a social image which in future would be considered as an asset, a resource and an authority.
If you want to read more about how to go about designing your Social media Strategy you can refer to following articles
Starting Up With Social Networking Strategy
Tips and Tricks of Implementing a Social Networking Strategy
Finally , Metrics: How do I track my social media success
here’s a list of tools which might help you to monitor your social media.
I’m still trying these tools out and will post you my findings once i’m done.
1. To monitor social campaigns: Wildfire social media monitor.
2. To monitor social networks & blogs: Social mention, Google reader, Blogpulse, Alltop, Google realtime search.
3. To monitor upcoming events: plancast.
4. To monitor with alerts: Google alerts, Backtypr alerts, Yahoo pipes, Northern light search.
5. To monitor web page changes: Watchthatpage.
6. To monitor with social search: addict-o-matic, guzzle, social seek.
I will be covering all these social media analytics in detail in my next article. Social media analytics is really interesting and guide you about your audience, what your audience likes, what are their preferences, feedbacks and ultimately what you should do to improve your site visibility and conversions.
Thanks for sharing your view on buying FB fans & twitter followers. Main point here is while buying you need to be sure you are getting only active and authenticated twitter followers not a fake one.
Maintaining 1K , 2k twitter followers is quite difficult task, hence if we need to increase the followers then you have the option of buying it.
I buy my fb fans from a website that actually offers a lot of different services for all the major social media platforms. I have also bought website traffic from them in the past to increase my Alexa rankings. And for everyones information, yes, fb has cracked down on all the “fake” and “bot” likes, but if you purchase from a source that uses real accounts, you won’t have any issues. I haven’t had any problems like getting my likes removed or having my fb pages banned when I use the service that I do. The site is: http://www.seototal.net
Hope this helps some people out…
Thanks for sharing! Buying Facebook Fans is best use when you start to have you own Fb page. I used to promote my page and so other would like my page as well. I order real people likes from http://www.bestsocialprovider.biz/ and was deliver on time, hassle free transaction and very nice support . For those who are want to own a page and get a lot of attention you can try buying FB fans, (there’s no harm on trying) they are REAL people, all you have to do is to engage to them and show that you are not a robot. But please be aware that there’s a lot of seller that give bots 🙂