Social Media For Niche Sites
Sometimes people ask me about social media for niche sites. I’ve written about it before, but for the life of me I can’t find where. It was early in the niche site challenge so I’m pretty sure my views have evolved anyway.
Here’s what I think about how to use social media for niche sites.
What Is The Point Of Social Media?
As a general concept, I ask myself that all the time.
From a marketer’s perspective, there are a few uses for social media:
- Feedback from customers
- Cheap customer support
- Starting The Funnel and Lead Generation
For a niche website, you’ll probably use your social media profiles for the third option, lead generation for your niche, and not a lot else.
You don’t have customer support to worry about, you’re probably not trying to build a community and feedback from customers is useful but it’s not going to be a huge time drain.
So, we’re using Social Media as a lead generation tool for our niche sites. Let’s talk about how to do that, but first… key rule time.
The Key Rule With Social Media For Niche Sites
The key rule for social media for niche sites is that you cannot allow it in any way, shape or form to become a time-consuming activity. You’re simply not going to get a decent return on investment by spending an hour a day on social media for a niche site.
So you need to do two things:
- Automate
- Optimise
Optimising is the easiest part of this; keep your niche site social media posting to a few things:
- Let people know what you’re posting and when
- Once you have an audience, ask them a few basic questions. (e.g. What do you want to see more of)
- Post news snippets that are relevant to your niche
- Copy-paste sentences from your articles that make a good point in a single sentence
Automating all of this has a bit of a learning curve but the tools are all there. You can use free tools like Buffer and IFTTT to do most of this, and WordPress even has plugins that’ll direct your posts to places.
If you get to be a bit of a wizard with the above tools, you don’t really need the paid options. That said, there are paid social media posters that are probably worth it if you have multiple sites. More on that in another article (I’m testing a few out and don’t want to recommend any before I’ve found the pros and cons.)
How To Generate Leads With Social Media For Niche Sites
There are two major things to consider when it comes to lead generation using social media:
- The medium
- The message
The medium is the social network itself. People on Facebook behave differently to people on Twitter and are looking for different things.
Now, if you’re running a business and it’s your full-time income, then you have to learn how these mediums can best be optimised and all that stuff… but once again, if you’re making $200 a month, it’s not worth spending hours trying to work out what works best. Here’s the deal though for a quick overview:
Overview Of Properties
Facebook: Longer text works. You don’t have limits on your text lengths for Facebook page posts. Here’s what I recommend: Setting the limit/Copy-pasting the first part of your article and an image to Facebook so that you doa lot of attention grabbing and building a little intrigue. Leave the features and benefits for after the click.
Twitter: You get a single sentence. This has to be clickbait. Also, low half-life on Twitter visibility means it’s easier for you to post about the same thing multiple times, so post many links to a single article over time with different headlines and whatever.
Instagram: You can’t link direct from a particular post. What this means is get your website up on the profile bit and then just post cute images that are relevant to your niche. Don’t put all that much effort in.
Google Plus: Does this really matter? I simply point all the other social networks to this page and have it reposts tweets, FB posts and everything. It doesn’t move the needle much for me in any case.
LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. You don’t need these for a standard niche site but they might be relevant depending on your niche. (Photography is good for Tumblr, Pinterest is good for girly stuff and LinkedIn is relevant if you’re an affiliate for B2B stuff sometimes.)
Final Thoughts
I’m cutting this article short because really all of the above is a massive case of overthinking it. With niche sites, you’re mostly going to get traffic from SEO and backlinks regardless and social media will help but won’t make or break your site.
That said, all of the above is relatively low-priority and won’t take long once you’ve set up a system, whether you automate it or not.
I recommend automating what you can and then signing in every so often to interact with human beings.
Remember always to judge your actions based on whether you’re getting a positive return on the time and effort you invest. (In other words, don’t spend 15 hours a week on social media and think that money will pour in.)