For a brand new site, it can take 2-4 months for new articles to rank on the front page of Google.
But you don’t have to wait that long to start bringing in new readers and page views. By sharing your articles on social media platforms, you can start getting traffic right away.
Research by Searchmetrics has shown that social media shares are highly correlated with how well an article ranks on Google. This means you can speed up the process of ranking by getting views on your article through social media.
The actual social media platform that will drive the most traffic to your articles is dependent on your niche. Some platforms simply attract readers in certain niches. For example:
Facebook tends to be best for sharing articles in the following niches:
- Travel
- Food/Recipe Sites
- Arts & Crafts
- Home Improvement
- Gardening
Twitter tends to be best for the following niches:
- Personal Finance
- Fitness
- Self-improvement
Pinterest tends to be best for the following niches:
- Clothing & Fashion
- Home Improvement
- Food/Recipe Sites
Reddit is another social media platform that has hundreds of thousands of subreddits – groups that revolve around specific interests.
I’ve found that focusing most of my attention on one social media platform per website yields the best results. Here are the platforms that I personally use for each of my sites:
- Four Pillar Freedom: Twitter
- Statology: Reddit (r/statistics and r/AskStatistics)
- Easy Keto Dishes: Pinterest
- Wander Cincinnati: Reddit (r/Cincinnati and r/Ohio)
Two Paths to Social Media Traffic
There are two main ways to get traffic from social media:
1. Build your own following
One way to get traffic is to build up your own following. This way, you can get traffic to each new article that you post on a certain platform.
This is what I’ve personally done with my Four Pillar Freedom Twitter account. By growing it to over 15,000 followers, I’ve built a sizable audience so that each time I tweet a link to one of my articles it reliably gets hundreds (sometimes thousands) of page views from a single tweet.
The obvious drawback of this approach is that it can take several months or years to build up an audience of this size.
2. Tap into platforms that already have huge followings.
The other way to get traffic from social media is to simply use pre-existing platforms that already have huge followings.
One example of this is Reddit. I joined the Cincinnati subreddit when I created my travel blog Wander Cincinnati and I now post most of my new articles on that subreddit, which often leads to hundreds (sometimes thousands) of pageviews in a single day.
The benefit of this approach is that I don’t have to spend time actually building up a following on Reddit; instead, I simply use a subreddit that already has a huge following of people who are all interested in topics about Cincinnati.
The drawback of this approach is that I don’t have any control over the platform and it’s possible to get banned from Reddit, which would mean I would lose access to that following overnight.
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