The social media Hub Strategy

The hub strategy is a way of using social media along with your web site(s) to gain and keep an audience. It’s golden to have an audience who routinely returns to your website. Those who routinely return are already sold (somewhat) on what you’re up to doing, and it should be easier to sell them on taking some action you want them to do. That action could be anything from signing a petition, to buying a book.

This diagram may help

The “hub site” is your home on the web. It’s the place where you are presenting you and your message. It’s the place that’s ideally the center of activity you build for your audience. The hub strategy uses social media websites to drive traffic to the hub site. The hub site must have plenty of ways to be shared onto social media websites, and must also be interesting enough for the audience to stick around. The hub site can be used to drive traffic to other sites.

Make it easy for the audience to “follow” you on social media sites. That is, on each social media network you’ll have a profile page (such as http://twitter.com/7genblogger), so link to your social media profile pages from your hub website. Alternatively, services like about.me or Google Profiles allow you to list links to all your social media profiles. If you set up a good profile page on a profile service, then linking to that profile page. The idea is to make it easy for your audience to find your social media presence and follow you.

On each social network set up a useful profile, that links back to your hub website. This way if someone finds your social network activity, they may click to your profile page to see who you are, and by linking to your website you make it easy for them to find your hub site.

On the hub site make it enticing to stick around. Make it easy to find useful articles. Make it easy to leave comments. Make the commenting system engaging and that it sends out notifications so that they’re frequently reminded you exist.