Understanding Social Media Websites

Social media websites are currently extremely popular. Social media is about you, the user of the website, and what you want to see. The traffic which comes from the websites is of the highest quality available online as the website visitors are genuinely interested in reading the content on the pages.

SM traffic is different from most normal internet traffic, users have not searched for anything, in this case they are actually looking for something to read or entertain themselves with. The traffic is in many cases, viral, users commonly discover interesting content and submit it to social media sites where it can become extremely popular overnight.

Types of Social media traffic:

• Recommendation sites: Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Mixx, and many others. These sites allow users to submit content to the website, and if other users like it, they will vote it "up", thus placing it higher in a rank of the most popular websites. Sometimes the sheer volume of users who will visit the site will result in the server crashing, in many cases, if a page reaches the #1 spot on a Recommendation site, it can receive up to 100,000 unique visitors in a very short period of time.
• Social Bookmarking: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Clipmarks. Social Bookmarking is virtually the same thing as simply saving a website as a bookmark in your browser, with the exception that other users see your bookmarks and you can compare how many other people have bookmarked that page as well.
• Social Networking: Facebook, MySpace, Friendster. Social networking websites are based around connecting with friends online and sharing media through the websites. These pages offer the deepest level of customization for the users as they are allowed to modify their profiles on a very personal level and include only their network of friends they choose.

If you can manage to get people interested to the point where they will submit your website to one of the following social media sites, you will have virtually automated traffic. If your website goes viral, you best have a good host as it could receive millions of visits in a very short period of time.

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