I've seen much more integration of directories with social sites over the last year. I'm interested in seeing what people are doing. It seems it is quite important these days. Matt Cutts of google recently said that social signals can influence rankings, especially real time seach, but likely all search soon. One directory that got on the bandwagon relatively early last year was Socialrific.com, and we interviewed the owner. I get the impression that more people are finding value in submitting to directories when there are social link benefits in addition to the normal listings. So have any of you added things like Twitter and Facebook to your directories? Has it helped you get more paid submissions?
Integrating with Social sites is a bliss as it helps us to make the promotion more faster and people are tempted to read or submit to our directories. Due to this, we get more and more visitors and more often. Since the information is being pasted at a rapid pace, we are able to get more traffic. Yes, Twitter and Facebook helps a lot in these kind of traffic generation strategies. Hope everyone agrees with my point.
I am nowhere doing as much as Socialrific but am trying to move in that general direction but without anything near their level of sophistication. I have long felt that directory owners were missing the boat by not giving clients an ability to turn it into an advertising/promotion vehicle. If they are missing anything I feel a second or extended details description would be a good way to add unique content to their page. A thing I am finding and in my quick look today few people are taking advantage of these options. This surprises me as it seems more and more websites make extensive of, especially Twitter and Facebook. You should see some of the invalid Twitter names I see Seems the submission folk have no clue abut what is likely coming. There may be big things coming in the, not so distant future.
Social media is one of the newest and most effective tool which you can promote your website/directories with. But simply integrating your directory with social sites buttons isn’t going to help much with your branding efforts, it’s important to strategically use social media tools to increase exposure and reach your target audience.
I had looked into providing submitters the ability to add Twitter feeds and realized it opened up my site to great risk. My thinking was that it could be used to keep the details pages full of constantly changing content as well as offer more promotional options for submitters. All of my sites are strictly family friendly. It didn't take much searching on Twitter, Facebook and other similar sites to come across very un-family friendly comments and entries. And, then there were the political conversations and Tweets with affiliate links, etc. I asked folks working in one of my niches and it wasn't long before they came to the same conclusion - I'd either risk having filth or have to continually police everything. Granted, it would have eliminated some of those issues had I only provided links to the accounts rather than posting feeds, but we all know how quickly a site/person can go from posting sane, well-reasoned posts to a raving lunatic. In the long run, I felt the risk of linking to bad neighborhoods outweighed the benefits. Of course, I might be all wet and am shooting myself in the foot. lol
This is pretty much the current trend and the way forward. I have seen many people advertising directories on various social sites which I think is a very good thing.
Addressing the concern about twitter feeds getting spammy or even a threat to a family friendly site, I think this danger also exists for the link itself, as it could be hacked or otherwise forwarding to adult content over time, so reviewing the listings is important. There are also some ways to automate these kinds of checks (ex. automatic link checker or xenu link sleuth). It also wouldn't hurt to use the Report this Link mod (from Monster Submit). One thing that James came up with recently that is pretty nifty is a details page mod that does Twitter, RSS, Disqus and more. Here is a demo. I think we will be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing in the future.
My directory Yazzoo has the ability on the submit page to add your social network pages aswell as you site on the same details page, see Yazzoo submit if you enter an url on the submit page for your say twitter page it will add a twitter icon to you details page. I get a lot of submissions but not many add their social details, shame really. Yazzoo is a premium directory
That's cool that you are getting a lot of submissions. Good price points and a good pagerank. Interesting that you don't get many social links added. I think there are a lot of businesses that still don't have twitter and facebook even though they are well established. On the other hand, there are are some that are all over it, as they see the traffic benefits.