Train Thoughts

Social Networking features can drive traffic like good SEO.

There are a few ways to get traffic to a website.  I’m going to rank them by value.  Build a useful site that spreads by word-of-mouth. Number two, search engine optimization. Number three, social networking.  Four is an email newsletter and five is many possibilities like RSS or promotions.

We’ve been talking about SEO for years and today we were reminded of the value with How Things Work getting bought by Discovery. Here.  Here. Here and Here.  Lot’s of reminders.

Now, social networking is the new SEO.  It’s a feature set that ties a community to a website.  It can be tight like friends or loose like HubPages, forums, or other community sites that revolve around a topic.

My top social networking features.  Number one, invite your friends.  Where would Myspace and Facebook be without this?  Small.  Number two, find your friends on this service. Number three ties it altogether
with email notifications of things like new friend requests, and photo albums.

I think more and more sites will realize that social networking sites are less about friends and more about growing a websites traffic.