
It’s great writing your thoughts and feelings each day, but if no one’s reading, what’s the point?
You could be like me – I wrote in journals for years and no one read that shit and no one cared and when I started blogging that served me well. I talked to a brick wall for more than a year before you dropped by (except you) and still am in many cases.
But can you do that? And why bother when you can use social media to increase the number of eyes on your Montana website quickly? Yep, I’m talking about increasing the traffic to your Montana website and I’m talking about using social media to do it.
Is that worth something to you? I thought so, so go buy one of my books, huh?
Good, now, let’s get into it.
Analyzing Social to Understand Social Media in Montana
I was talking to the owner of this site just today actually because they were thinking of hiring my services. They decided not to, and their loss is your gain. Here’s the site:
What I want you to notice are those three social share buttons at the top right hand corner of the screen:
Those three buttons are Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and they’re the three legs of your social media marketing stool, or how you get people interested in whatever it is you’re doing…buy your product…or vote for you.
Obama used this shit to get elected and one of his main advisors was from Montana and knew how to make this shit work for him. So listen!
When I get to a site that I find even remotely interested in I’ll go ahead and click on all three of those buttons, 1-2-3, with my mouse button while holding the Ctrl key on the computer so they all open quickly in three new windows at the top of my browser (I use Google Chrome)
This is what I get for the first social media account for that site, Twitter.
Using Twitter in Montana
But they have an audience…or do they? I scrolled down and found that most tweets by Brown Box had about 6 to 10 favorites or retweets…not a whole lot for 8,000 followers.
This goes to show that many times – and I’ve seen this before – many times you’ll have lots of followers on Twitter but they’re not engaged and are pretty much worthless actually.
That’s not always the case, but it is a common problem, and that’s attracting followers outside of your main niche or industry, which in this case might be Montana politics.
Let’s continue with the next social share icon, Facebook.
Using Facebook for Montana Websites
In other words, they’ve got a lot of people to like them, but not a lot to keep tabs on them. That’s like having a boat but never using it, so it might just be wasting more of your time and money than you want. After all, what benefit are you getting…and how do you even measure it?
To answer that, let’s take a look at the final social share account, and that’s Google+.
Google+ and Montana Website Traffic
See, Google is where people are finding your site, unless they’re typing in your exact link or following a link from another site…most of which will be socially-shared links.
So people type stuff into Google like “seo services” in this case, and you hope to hell that your company, Brown Box in this case, comes up.
Conclusion

But more importantly, Google has now indexed that content and those keywords and now when someone types in whatever to Google, I’ll come up, at least for my content.
That’s called SEO, and what I talked about for a long time up above is how you can cue that social sharing into your SEO to make your website come up in the rankings and get more traffic, people reading, and ultimately for you here in Montana, people voting.
Of course that means adding new and relevant and exciting content, and that’s where people like me come in. People pay me to do this, but right now I’m stealing traffic your site could’ve had. So now I’m getting those votes and you’re not, and I’m not even running. You might still be in this year’s race, but in the long-term game, I’m pulling way ahead of you.
So get started with your social accounts, or you’ll be left in the electronic dust.
Bonus for you smart folks
Is Brown Box being left in the electronic dust? To check that I’ll go to Alexa, which is a site that lets you measure the traffic of other sites…or see how many people are visiting.
A much better idea is to use Google Analytics to figure out where your own traffic is coming from, but that might be too difficult for you if you’re an out-of-touch and old candidate running for the legislature.
In that case you might want to hire someone like Brown Box, or one of those guys in India. Good luck!