Integrate with Facebook & Twitter to increase you Adsense earnings!

[born2run]

Hi folks,

If you have a popular site with popular topics, I'd highly advise you to integrate with Facebook & Twitter to increase your adsense earnings and site traffic.

With facebook you create a group for your site. With twitter you create an account with them using your site name. Use bit.ly to create an account and post your latest articles with shortened urls in Twitter and facebook.

Increasing the facebook and twitter followers is another ballgame but it's worth the time spent as now Facebook has surpassed Google in time spent with users on the net. Same with Twitter. The traffic is enormous!

So there's my two cents worth. Happy facebookin' and twitterin'

Regards!

[netmeg]

Well you can have multiple pages, but I never tried to mix a message like that. If the niches are really *that* different, I'd probably make multiple pages. I have a client who is a combination yo-yo/juggler/magician/educator, and he and I have set up separate pages for his yo-yo exhibitions, his juggling (where he hires out for community programs and entertainment) and his school assemblies, some of which use magic and yo-yo/juggling to demonstrate scientific principles. There's some overlap, but they target different demographics.

I have another client where we're going run a contest that asks the entrants to submit pictures of how they are using a particular product. That should be fun for all involved, and it might give some customers new ideas on how THEY can use the product. Win Win Win.

[fearlessrick]

All I can say is that I tweet and FB most of my new blog posts and articles. Followers have increase as has traffic, hits, and, best of all, REVENUE, from a variety of sources.

My advice is to try it, use an "addthis" (great tool, strongly suggest) button and tweet and FB your own posts. I haven't even tried with Google community (or whatever they're calling it these days) or any del.icious or any of the other, Yahoo, stumble, etc., but the result I've seen over the past few months have been palpable.

Maybe not for everyone, but, I ask you this: do you really want to pass up what is, essentially, free advertising?

[born2run]

Great fearlessrick. Good luck with fb and twitter!

[Lame_Wolf]

Maybe not for everyone,

You're spot on with that one.

but, I ask you this: do you really want to pass up what is, essentially, free advertising?

Yes.

I'd rather climb in the SERPS (or remain where I am) than piss around with FP etc.

I already get traffic from such places. Other people advertise my site without me asking to. That leaves me to do more important things in life.

[HuskyPup]

do you really want to pass up what is, essentially, free advertising?

Obviously not however I feel, for my sites, it is the implementation of it I am not at all sure of however after reading netmeg's and drall's posts they have given me some good ideas of how I could do something but the only problem is that I do not have the time to do it therefore I'm going to delegate it to someone who is an experienced FB personal user and oversee what they do.

So long as it can financially be justified, that'll be easy enough to evaluate, I'm prepared to give it a few months' trial...there, that's put my neck on the chopping bock!

[netmeg]

I'll be interested to know how it works out for you, HP.

[bwnbwn]

twitter IMO is about the same as myspace. Remember all the hype about doing this and that on myspace. I don't see this anymore wonder why. Twitter is following the same road and people are getting bored with all the spam and other junk that goes with the site. This recent hack has done great harm in the site especially when they were warned months ago about the hole and just plain didn't care to fix it until users were effected. I don't plan anytime soon to visit the site and I bet many are feeling the same way.

FB is another animal and I tried the advertising route on it and it was a complete waste of 100 bucks.

[HuskyPup]

Hi netmeg, you sold the idea to me with this:

You can encourage people with common interests or needs for your goods or services to talk to each other.

You can offer your customers a place to interact with you with feedback or about issues (careful - must be monitored closely)

You can treat your Facebook page like a VIP area where your fans get something that they don't get anywhere else. In my case, I give them extra information that they don't get on the site.

Whilst I am the specialist widget supplier to major trade wholesalers/importers worldwide my sites are often the only on-line source for much of the technical information and since there is so much mis and disinformation regarding these widgets I'm going to give it a go and see if I can get end-users to interact.

I have absolutely no idea what I am letting myself in for therefore I'm throwing my youngest daughter (23) at it since I know she will always question me before posting anything she's unsure about.

Are there any specific no nos before unleashing it on an unsuspecting world?

[tim222]

When I post regularly on Twitter, my site traffic and revenue increase. It is noticeable, however the time and effort involved don't really make it worthwhile. The thing is that when I do something like this, I go all in. My "tweets" are thought out, and work in conjunction with website activity as well as other tweets. I am not willing to set up a bot that posts messages that it received from an RSS feed, then call that my Twitter page. I think that would have a different effect, anyway.

China blocks Facebook and Twitter,
the government calls it a sensless waste of time

LOL they are probably right.

[anand84]

I'm on Facebook and Twitter. I hate both of them. I don't even get too many visitors from there. But still, I can see the potential these websites have.

Of course, the number of followers do not matter. It's the quality of visitors. For good or bad, Twitter is now actually mainstream and there are a lot of regular guys who check emails once a week who are on Twitter as well. Now, using the medium to get audience is as tricky as SEO is and takes a lot of effort.

Most people I assume make the mistake in deciding that these are worthless traffic that don't convert. But come to think of it, a Facebook group/fan page is no different than a forums section on your website. A lot of website owners - including those eCommerce people who sell boring grey widgets have forums where people can discuss the how-tos. Now, moving that section to Facebook makes sense. Now if one of your visitors 'likes' you on FB, it naturally gets seen by their network friends and if any of their friends are also those who are interested in that boring grey widget, you just acquired a new potential customer.

In terms of customer acquisition, social media can be gold if done correctly. But I'm still wondering why this thread is on the Google Adsense section.

[yaix2]

Great list, drall, thanks! I have looked a little into Twitter before and found it useless, but will take a closer look into FB now.

<off-topic>

China blocks Facebook and Twitter,
the government calls it a sensless waste of time

They want people to use renrenwang, the chinese FB clone.
</off-topic>

[Lame_Wolf]

China blocks Facebook and Twitter,
the government calls it a sensless waste of time

At last, A government with sense. :)

[viggen]

Facebook is for me (book review site) just pure awesomenes, it has never been so easy for me now to get so quickly and casual into contact with authors and publishers. (Hey famous author, want do do quickly an interview, "hey mr. publisher, need a few books for giveaway)

I use FB only for business (dont have private account) and all my "friends" are authors, publishers, and editors. It doesnt bring in traffic, but oh boy it does bring in contacts to make content that brings in traffic...

[mickmel]

There's some funny stuff in here...

jetteroheller -- First you said you had 27,000 followers, then later said you had 7,000, which you acquired by purchasing them, and then got suspended. In either cases, those numbers might as well be zero. If you don't use Twitter to actually interact with others, it's worthless.

Lame_Wolf -- Talking to your potential customers, readers, etc, isn't "important"?

My main purpose on both sites is interaction, gaining knowledge, finding story ideas, etc. However, for those that want real numbers, we've had about 5,000 visitors this month from our Facebook page and about 2,000 from Twitter. Neither one has huge numbers of followers/fans, but the ones we have are legit. No games, no shortcuts -- just steady growth.

I'll admit that those aren't huge numbers, but they're rising every month. While Google certainly isn't going anywhere, and I'll continue to work hard on SEO, Facebook is consuming more visitors than Google is and we can't just ignore that.

Your users are on these sites whether you are or not. Giving them simple ways to share you content with their friends is only going to help.

[netmeg]

The topic started out discussing whether Facebook and Twitter can help AdSense revenue, and then drifted to using social media in general. It's still a useful topic, and still relevant to those of us who run AdSense sites.

In my experience, I don't believe that users bopped over from Facebook or Twitter and immediately clicked on AdSense, bringing me revenue. But I *did* experience a huge traffic increase, much of which was referred from those sources, and a huge increase in bookmarks - i.e. people saving my pages for later, and emailing them or recommended them to their friends, or posting them on their own Facebook profiles, or tweeting them out - and ultimately, my revenue more than tripled.

To sum up -

I put very little money into it - maybe $100 total for widgets, some coding help, etc.

I put maybe 25 hours into getting it set up, troubleshooting it, and keeping it running during my peak season.

I'm close to four times higher revenue than my previous best year (2008) and it's only September.

I have these neat little communities now who feel like they know me, and have told me how much they love my sites and given me suggestions for improvements, and feedback on new site ideas. When I'm ready to launch my next one, I have a couple thousand people I can notify immediately to go check it out and maybe pass it on.

Can't think of any way this is not a solid win.

[edited by: netmeg at 2:27 pm (utc) on Sep 23, 2010]

[Lame_Wolf]

Lame_Wolf -- Talking to your potential customers, readers, etc, isn't "important"?

Heard of email ? my visitors have. Customers? I don't sell anything.

[freejung]

Regarding the use of the "like" button vs. "become a fan," I'm beginning to suspect that it is possible, or soon will be possible, to use a facebook app to essentially turn the "like" button into the equivalent of the "become a fan" button. If you link the button to an app, you can apparently set up to publish to all of the people who "like" all pages on your site at the same time.

However, I have not attempted this yet. Does anyone have any experience with doing that, and any ideas to share?

[mickmel]

Virtually every website has customers. You might not be selling a product, but you're still trying to earn their time, attention and engagement. However, perhaps that was a poor choice of words.

I agree that email is still a great communication tool, and is become oft overlooked in recent years. However, it's difficult to use to to attract new visitors when compared to tools such as Facebook and Twitter -- ideas on there can spread rapidly, leading to a huge influx of traffic.

Bottom line though, if you're happy with your site, your traffic is continuing to grow, and you have no interest in using social tools right now, then this thread is of no value to you. Keep doing what you're doing, keep growing, and be prosperous!

[marketingmagic]

Every body talks social and how important it is yet I've never seen any actual hard data on the impact to either sales or site traffic.

If you're going to suggest twitter and facebook, share some insights on the numbers - if the numbers work then there's an ROI - if there's an ROI we'll do it.

[mickmel]

marketingmagic -- I just posted some numbers a few hours ago:

"However, for those that want real numbers, we've had about 5,000 visitors this month from our Facebook page and about 2,000 from Twitter. Neither one has huge numbers of followers/fans, but the ones we have are legit. No games, no shortcuts -- just steady growth."

Certainly not huge numbers, and overall a fairly small percentage of our total traffic, but it's certainly something we're keeping an eye on as social services continue to grow.

[netmeg]

If you're going to suggest twitter and facebook, share some insights on the numbers - if the numbers work then there's an ROI - if there's an ROI we'll do it.

Ork ork. I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. It's not our place to convince that you should be doing it, or how you can make your ROI (if that's your criteria up front, then you probably shouldn't bother) Nor to provide you with numbers, as though it would mean anything to you if we did anyway, which it wouldn't, since apples aren't oranges aren't grapefruits.

Some people look at something and see what is. Others look at it and see what could be. You either see a potential for you or you don't. If you don't, no skin off ours.

[Alcoholico]

Why would I throw my traffic, got with so much work, to an Internet black hole? I do use an addthis type gadget but other than that I see no reason to give away my visitors, all in all, this gadget only brings back some visitors I have already sent them, a fact is no one is going to advertise my site for free like I am not going to advertise for free some powerful corporations on my sites.

Good for China, by the way.

[Kufu]

Allow me add some perspective and number to this discussion.

I have a fan page for my website on Facebook that has over one million fans (nevermind how I got them--I got lucky); however, whenever I post a status update with a link to my website I can expect about 1000-5000 visitors.

Recently FB has started displaying user statistics to page admins, so I can now see that out of those million fans, only a little over 300k are active on a monthly basis (FB doesn't define what active means in this case, but my assumption is that they interact with my fan page at least once per month).

So as you can see, even with massive numbers FB is not a good traffic generator. There are a variety of reasons that only about 1000-5000 visitors trickle through with each linked status update; however, I won't go into that in this post.

Let's move onto Twitter. As many have said, Twitter consists of some good 'content', but is mostly junk. For example, a lot of Digg users utilize Twitter to promote their submissions to digg (for those who don't know, digg is a social bookmarking site). These types of updates, as well as other promotional crap is all over Twitter. This does not mean, however, that Twitter cannot generate traffic. If you are willing to spend the time, and create a following on Twitter, the CTR from the follower base is much better than FB.

[koan]

Good for China, by the way.

It's cute to say China think it's a waste of time but we all know the issue is they can't control and censor the information on those sites.

[Bennie]

<scarcasm>
…because there are no people that spend all day on twitter telling people about everything they do, and in doing so they NEVER share what they *bought*, how they *bought* it, or where they *bought* it.

In short, twitter is a vacuum of bots and NOBODY there *buys* anything. All the trending topics are actually made up by a guy called @EV and as mentioned earlier, you could NEVER sell things using twitter, let alone expand your potential market to a group of savvy early adopters!
</scarcasm>

The Internet has changed.

[sutips]

For those who want numbers, here's mine for August:

Facebook - 11,503
Twitter - 3,844

Considering that this is basically free traffic with only about 30 minutes of work total per day, I'm not complaining. If I use Adwords to get about 15,000 traffic per month, that will cost me some pretty penny.

Try it first before you dismiss it. If you know how to use these social media sites, you can get free traffic from it. No sweat at all. That is, if you know how.

[Lame_Wolf]

Considering that this is basically free traffic with only about 30 minutes of work total per day, I'm not complaining. If I use Adwords to get about 15,000 traffic per month, that will cost me some pretty penny.

Who wants free traffic ? I want decent traffic. I get that from the search engines.

If you need to spend money on Adwords, it's because you are low down in the SERPS.

I've never spent a penny on advertising. I get traffic from Twitter, FB, etc as well as Stumble and all the other "social" sites, yet none of that advertising was done by me. My site has been in a number of newspapers, books, TV programs - again others doing the advertising.

What did I do to deserve all this ? Just make a site that people love and enjoy.

With the SERPS, once you are where you want to be, you can concentrate on another keyword/phrase to target, or do something else.

Twitter seems like a place where you are pouring water into a bucket with holes in it. Constantly having to pour water in, to keep it full.

If it floats your boat, then do it. Myself, nah.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Everyone owes it to themselves to spend a day setting up a profile for each site on every major social network if for no other reason than to reserve the name.

During that day sign up with a service like Feedburner that will notify your twitter accounts when you post. Most social networks allow for automated posting and the ones that don't will passively look at your feed from time to time. In other words set it up and forget about it at first while you work on your sites. In time you may see a small following begin, that's when you can nurture it along as netmeg suggests.

Believe me, if the effort you put in on your sites is of superior quality people can and will come looking for you on their social networks. It all starts with your site quality, the networks can't build that for you.

[Lame_Wolf]

Everyone owes it to themselves to spend a day setting up a profile for each site on every major social network

You couldn't even pay me to join such sites. And it's nothing to do with the privacy - which is a major bane atm for a certain site.

I don't want to tell the world that I am stuck in a lift with Stephen Fry, or some other drivel that I feel I must tell everyone instantly.

It's nothing about being an old fart not liking technology. Far from it. It's pointless, gimmicky, flash in the pan, and will no doubt, be overtaken by the next fad.

Remember that million dollar pixel thingy that happened a few years back. Then you had all the wannabe's making similar ones, just to find that "the magic income" didn't happen for them. They died of death. Hopefully, this fad will do too.

Do it, if you want to. But IMO, 99% of you will be wasting your time for the little that you will gain out of it.

Yes, some will say "I'm doing ok", but would you have done better if your site was high up in the SERPS ? Probably.

[netmeg]

Ok, Lame_Wolf. We got your point. You're not interested. Doesn't mean you have to naysay everyone who IS using it or who is thinking of using it.

(BTW, my sites are VERY high in the SERPs. Doesn't mean I don't use alternative sources of traffic, paid and non paid)