How to use Facebook to increase blog traffic

Facebook is the most popular social networking site with over 350 million members. Not only is it a great tool to connect with friends, family, colleagues and more across the world, but it's also a great tool to increase traffic to your blog. Following are 10 tips to increase blog traffic with Facebook.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="913"] How to Grow Your Blog Audience by Networking on Facebook[/caption]

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1. Complete Your Profile Strategically

Consider your goals for your Facebook profile.  If you want to use it as a tool to establish yourself as an expert in your field and drive traffic to your blog, then you need to make sure your profile includes the information to support your expertise.  Be careful about the types of photos, videos, and personal interests you include in your profile though.  To use Facebook as a tool to drive traffic to your blog, you'll need to make a lot of Facebook friends, and it's likely you won't want them all to see those pictures of you drinking in college!

2. Find Friends

Use the search tool to find people on Facebook.  You can search by name, company, school, and more.  You don't need to know a person before you request to be their friend on Facebook.  The worst that can happen is that they decline or ignore your request, and the best that can happen is that they become a part of your Facebook network!  You can also find people to friend by looking through the friends of people you're already friends with and looking through Facebook groups and pages to find people with similar interests to your own.  When you find people who match your criteria and might be interested in your blog content, go ahead and send them a friend request!

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3. Join Groups or Create Your Own Group

You can create a group for any topic or reason on Facebook and invite people to join it.  Search for groups related to your blog's topic, and then join those groups and get active in the conversations going on in those groups.  If you can't find just the right Facebook group to support your efforts to drive traffic to your blog, create one!  You can send out group invitations to all of your Facebook friends.

4. Create a Facebook Page and Become a Fan of Other Facebook Pages

The Facebook page feature is another great way to network with the Facebook audience. You can become a fan of existing Facebook pages (just search for ones related to your blog and then join the converation), and you can create your own. Facebook pages can only be created by official representatives for a company, brand or celebrity. Your blog could be considered a brand, so go ahead and create a Facebook page for your blog. Then be sure to feed your blog's content into your Facebook page status updates and continually add interesting information to it to keep the conversation going.

5. Link Your Other Social Accounts to Your Facebook Profile and Page

There are many tools available to help you build a great Facebook profile and/or page that can drive traffic directly and indirectly to your blog. Take the time to link your blog's RSS feed to your status updates, link your Twitter feed, SlideSharecontent, and so on to your Facebook profile or page. This way, your updates appear in your status stream for all of your friends to see. In some cases, a new tab is added to your Facebook profile or page, so content from some other services (such as SlideShare) is always easy to find.

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6. Promote Your Facebook Link

Include your Facebook link in your blog's sidebar, in your email signature, and anywhere else you can think of to encourage more people to find you and send you a Facebook friend request.

7. Be Active

Don't just create your Facebook profile, page or group and then disappear. In order for your Facebook efforts to drive traffic to your blog, you need to actively update your status, share great content, join conversations, and engage with other people. By building relationships with your Facebook friends, you can indirectly grow your blog's audience, too.

8. Acknowledge and Reciprocate

It's one thing to make friends on Facebook but it's another thing entirely to build relationships with them. Don't just spend all of your Facebook time updating your own profile and sharing your own content. Instead, spend the majority of your Facebook time commenting on other people's statuses and conversations, sharing other people's great content, responding to direct messages, and so on.

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9. Place a Facebook Ad

Facebook ads are fairly inexpensive, can be targeted, and can raise awareness of your blog, your Facebook page, or anything else you want to advertise.

10. Be Human

Facebook has a very personal edge to it. Unlike LinkedIn, which leans more toward a business edge, Facebook users expect members to be human, not promotional. With that in mind, mix your status updates and content between promotional information and entertaining, personal updates (just don't get too personal, remember how many people can see your Facebook updates).