Is posting a link always the best way to go?

Content marketers have a well established technique to drive traffic. Publish a social network posting containing a link to further content, and hope the viewer finds the opening paragraph interesting enough to select the link.

But it doesn’t work all the time. Not even close. And it’s only going to get worse.

The proliferation of content writers and marketers has created a diluted stream of link postings throughout all social networks. As a result viewer fatigue has become a real issue. Viewers start filtering more and more selectively what they click on.

Filtering content is what we all do every day. What alternative do we have? So for online business, the question is, “How do we filter postings, and what’s the best way to get through our own filters”?  

One criteria we use to determine whether or not we select a posting is, “are there comments?” Comments cause a posting to stand out. Comments provide more initial information for us to draw from. Comments stimulate our curiosity and the need to be in on the discussion. So naturally they get more attention.

A recent discussion on LinkedIn talks about the declining amount of traffic content marketers are seeing navigating to the websites they are promoting. A number of issues have been brought up and I encourage a read.

One of my favorite comments in that discussion was submitted by Rupert Waddington who suggested directly, “Maybe just post better blogs?” That indeed is one way to get more comments, more engagement and more through traffic, but we can’t all have the best blogs.

An alternative is to post the synopsis of your blog posting directly into the social media channel. This more simplistic approach gets through the viewer filter that blocks postings with links, and leads to a comment stream that would not otherwise occur.

Once the comment stream begins, you have an opportunity to introduce your blog posting to an already engaged audience. With the link added into the comment stream, you revitalize the discussion and feed new comments and thereby new traffic to your promoted page.

This approach may not be practical for Twitter due to the character limitation, but within Facebook and other social media channels a direct post can be the difference between driving traffic and not.

Much like so many marketing efforts of the past, this new promotion environment requires the same considerations. It is critical to know the media, and how people interact with that media.