How Facebook Tagging Can Drive More Traffic To Your Blog

This is a guest post compiled by +Chima Tim  for OgbongeBlog

Most Bloggers know how to tag their friends in their Facebook status updates, unfortunately, most are not using it to drive massive traffic to their blogs. Some bloggers even think getting traffic from Facebook is all about using Facebook Pages, which to me, is not easy to use especially in terms of management.

If you own a Facebook account, you can start driving massive traffic to your blog for free if you tag like a pro. It's a quick way of getting traffic back to your blog while doing what you've been doing; updating your Facebook status. I'm not just telling you this without testing it out.

The first day I tried it, I tagged only 3 of my friends who are bloggers. The trio has up to 15000 friends combined, an average of 5000, I only having about 500 friends. The next morning, I opened my StatCounter tracker and to my surprise I saw about 600 unique visits all coming from Facebook. For 2 days, I got up to 2000 visits. I also noticed increase in ads revenue too. Since that day, I've been using the trick and working fine for me.

So, How Does It Works?

It works like this:

- You shorten the URL of the blog post you want to promote;
- Sign in to Facebook, go to your privacy settings and set your status updates to public;
- You compose a normal but engaging status update that is relevant with the link you're promoting, insert that link there and update.

Boom!

You're done, but there are some factors that will determine whether this will really work for you or not. These are: 

1. The Quality Of Friends

The quality of friends matter a lot, not just the quantity here. It's very important you have friends that are interested in your topic, in what you blog about.

Even if it's 20 targeted friends, it's ok. Out of the 20 some have to be high-worth.  For instance since you're a blogger, you'll need blogger friends that have a good number of blogger friends.

What do I mean?

Having someone like Darren Rowse of Problogger as a friend on Facebook and tagging him not only brings his eyes on that contact, it brings your contents to thousands of blogger's too, who are friends with Darren Rowse, because the organic reach of tagging is very powerful. So, this goes with other friends you've tagged. Their friends will see it. Since they are bloggers their privacy will be public for obvious reasons.

2. Use Url Shortner

Shortening your links is good, it actually lends an air of mystery and raises the awareness level of the tagged, which will move him or her out of curiosity to follow that link and see what's that all about.

If you do not shorten your link, those tagged and those viewing through the window (their friends), will not only see the title, they'll also see the site, which could be a turn off, especially if the title is not catchy and the domain name unprofessional (e.g a blog with a sub-domain like blogspot).
This decreases your visits.

I sign off with a fair warning: don't tag the same people you've tagged before constantly.

Doing that may get them annoyed. If you must tag, give them space or find another sets of friends.

I hope this makes some sense.

What's your take on this?

This post was written by +Chima Tim . He is a blogger and the founder of the "Internet Helper" blog.  You can connect with him on Facebook and Google+.