Have you heard about social networking sites?

They are the most popular thing around the net and most of the internet users use at least one social network regularly.

If we take a look at statistics, the largest social networking site, Facebook, has more than 400 million users!  There are also many other niche sites that are focused on networking with people having similar interests or people in similar professions.

In this article, I will discuss about getting traffic from Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon. These three services account for 85% of total social networking traffic.

Getting Traffic From Facebook

Facebook is largest social networking site and accounts for almost 50% of total social networking traffic. Here are some tips to get free traffic from Facebook:

1. Create A Page For Your Website: Creating a page on Facebook is the first and most important step. It does not take much time and gives you many tools to get traffic. For example, you can post announcements on wall to let people know about latest changes/improvements or products and can also send a newsletter type update to all the fans.
2. Add Facebook Like Button To your Website: Like button lets your visitors share your website with their friends. It is very effective tool. Just consider this scenario: If 10 people with 100 friends each share your website on their wall, you will get 1000 potential visitors!

Getting Traffic From StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is not as popular as Facebook but here’s a fact: at the point of writing, only Facebook is responsible for driving more social networking traffic! So, you should be focusing on it. Here are some tips that will help you to get free traffic from StumbleUpon:

1. Ask Friends To Review Your Website: You should ask your friends to review your site. Reviews will normally get you more traffic than simple “Thumbs Up”.
2. Have A Good Design: One interesting thing about StumblUpon visitors is that most of them prefer well designed sites. Take a look at the top sites and you will instantly find that most of have an eye catching design.
3. Offer A Free Online Tool: If you have taken a look at popular sites, you will also find that internet tools is a very famous category. You should consider offering a free and useful online tool. If you do this, StumbleUpon users will give your “Thumbs Up” to your site like mad!

Getting Traffic From Twitter

Twitter is world’s favorite micro blogging service and is growing like wildfire. It is not as big as Facebook or StumbleUpon but it accounts for 10% of social networking traffic and that’s not a small number!

1. Get More Followers: If you do not have followers, you can’t do anything on twitter. It is all about numbers, BIG numbers! Find popular twitter users in directories and follow them. Participation in discussions can also bring in new followers.
2. Add a ReTweet Button To your Website: Adding a ReTweet button to your website will let your visitors share your website with their followers. A good number of ReTweets can easily bring in lot of traffic.

So, in summary. Use the tips above to get traffic from social networking sites … without spending anything!

OK, so there are many other social networking websites but if you do well on the big three mentioned above, you won’t need them!