What is a Social Ping? 7 Ways to Boost Your Website With Social Pings

When looking to increase one’s website traffic, website owners will often ask themselves, “What is a social ping?”.

Social media experts will tell you that you need to ping articles as much as possible in order to rank them.

But is that really necessary? And if so, how can you create the most effective pings?

In this article, we’ll discuss social pings and show you how you can use them to boost your website and improve your online business.

What is a Social Ping?

A social ping is essentially a share or activity on social media related to an external link.

Social pings generally come from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and other smaller web 2.0 sites.

There are other types of pings too and we’ll discuss them later on in this article.

So basically, when you share or like an article on social media that will count as a social ping.

These can be beneficial to your website but only if used correctly, there are a lot of people who create hundreds of fake accounts on Facebook to share their links on for social pings.

This is one of the reasons why social pings are not such a huge ranking factor for Google because it’s difficult for Google to validate the quality of the pings.

The best way to use social media is to use it for what it was intended; building a brand and audience for your business.

In short, it’s best not to chase a set number of social shares because that will often lead you to create low quality pings that won’t benefit your business.

Focus on making it easy for fans to share your links on their social media profiles because that’s much more powerful.

7 Ways to Boost Your Website With Social Pings:

In this section we’ll learn how to create high-value social pings that will bring in traffic and sales.

Though social pings do not improve search engine rank on their own, they can indirectly lead to an increase in search engine ranks.

1. Use a Social Sharing Plugin In Your Website and Articles.

If you make it easy for people to do something they’ll be more likely to do it.

Make it easy for people to share your links on social media and they will. One of the easiest ways to do that is to use a social media sharing plugin.

There are plenty out there, and WordPress includes one by default, though I recommend changing it because it’s too small.

I like to include social media sharing buttons at the beginning and end of my articles.

Floating social media icons can be effective too, feel free to test out different plugins until you find the one that works for you. The point is to make it easy for people to share your content, one click and it’s done.

A simple change like this can lead to a drastic increase in social shares.

Another reason to use a social media plugin on your website is that it makes it easy for you to see the amount of times an article has been shared.

Just enable your social share count within your plugin settings.

2. Create Cover Images for Your Articles.

Facebook and Twitter will automatically fetch images from the external link and use them as a preview for the link.

It’s a good idea to include a cover image at the beginning of the article so it’s the first image fetched for social media.

How can this lead to an increase in social pings?

It’s simple; images are shared more often on social media. People are just more visual creatures by nature.

Most people don’t like to click plain-text links on social media. An image gives them a preview – something to expect. People will share it more often, and that means more social pings sent to your website.

Go ahead and test it.

3. Share Your Articles in Quality Groups.

On Facebook, there are many groups that you can join where you can share your article links.

The problem is that most of these groups are full of spam and nobody ever clicks the links.

Look for quality groups with members that are active and interested in the subject of your article.

You’ll save time and see more results, and people in those groups will be more likely to share it with their friends.

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Also, Share the Link More than Once: One mistake a lot of marketers make is that they share their new article once on social media and forget about it.

But you can share the same link multiple times, though I recommend waiting at least a week before you share it again. Sometimes when I share an article for the second or third time on social media, it gets more likes than the first time I posted it.

Take a moment to share your older articles, it can bring in a nice boost of traffic.

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4. Ask Friends or People in Your Niche to Share The Article Too.

If you write an all-purpose article, it’s a good idea to share it with your friends, as they’ll be supportive and share it on their profiles as well.

But I don’t recommend sharing everything with your friends because they’re not interested in the subjects you write about, and if you keep bothering them, they’ll block you.

We all have that one friend who keeps sending us links to crap articles we don’t care about.

Another approach, contact people in your niche and ask them to share the articles too. There are some people who are open to exchanging shares, but if they have a much larger audience than you, it’s a good idea to come up with some deal to provide them with value too.

For instance, write an article for them, or share more than one of their articles online, or help them out with something online.

There are a lot of small favors that you can do for people online that will make them more likely to help you out too.

5. Embed Tweets Into Your Articles.

It’s a good idea to use your article as an opportunity to promote your separate social media accounts. For example, if you share an article on Facebook, it’s a good idea to include links to your Twitter account within that article so you can grow that account too. One method that I recommend is including Embedded Tweets into your articles.

But I also recommend sharing other people’s Tweets too because it’s a good way to build a relationship, and they’ll be more likely to share that article with their fans.

If you do a mashup of articles or Tweets from various bloggers in your niche, most of them will feel proud that you mentioned them, and they’ll share it too.

That sends a wave of traffic to your website.

6. Offer a Contest or Giveaway.

This is an idea that a lot of companies use to promote their social media profiles and it’s quite simple too.

You won’t necessarily need a fancy sports car to offer as a prize, it could be something simple as a free membership for a tool or even a coupon code. There are plenty of digital products that you can acquire and offer to people as a giveaway.

Start a little raffle and select the winner randomly from the list of people who liked or shared your link. It’s really quite simple!

Just make a picture for your content and mention people need to share that picture and link for a chance to win a prize.

7. Mention a Specific Person.

The best way to get on someone’s radar is to send value in their direction, and a little free marketing never hurt anyone.

Find one or a handful of influential people in your niche and write an article about them or their advice.

These articles tend to do really well because the people that you mention will see it and share it on their social media profiles.

And chances are their social media profiles have a much larger audience than yours!

So those are a few ideas that you can play around with too boost your website traffic with social pings.

Indirect SEO Advantages of Social Pings:

What is a social ping and does it improve your rank in search engines?

The answer to that question is a little complicated, and as I mentioned earlier, social pings don’t affect search engine ranks.

But if you follow the seven pointers mentioned in this article, I can guarantee that your website will see a boost in search engine results.

WHY? 

It’s simple.

If you’re putting in effort to market your articles on social media, it won’t be long until someone decides to feature your website in one of their articles.

And that’s a back-link and exposure, which leads to a boost in search engine results.

For example, if you make a mashup of articles and feature a few different websites in one of your posts, other bloggers might catch on, and do the same with one of your articles.

So social pings can improve search engine ranks… but indirectly! 

Now do you understand what is a social ping?

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 Other Website Pings You Should Know About:

A ping is basically a little notification that there is activity on a website. When you publish a new article on your website, it’s a good idea to use some free services to ping the URL.

With WordPress, click “Settings” on the sidebar menu, and then click “Writing” and you’ll see a section for update services.

The links in this section will be “Pinged” when you add content to your website.

It’s a good idea to have as many links as possible in this list to make sure that all the different website databases are aware that there’s activity on your website.

Here’s WordPress’s official article about the subject and it also includes some links that you can add.

I added some more that I found on Google.

There are also some other services that you can use to send some more pings to your website, a quick Google search will bring up a few free tools.

I like to use these tools whenever I publish a new article, though I can’t tell if it makes much of a difference.

Either way, it doesn’t hurt.

Generally, whenever you publish a new article, the goal is to get the word out so it can be indexed faster.

I would start with these pings and then share the article on social media, following the guidelines mentioned earlier.

If you do this every time you publish a new article, I guarantee that your website will start bringing in serious traffic sooner than you think.

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To Conclude Our Social Ping Post..

Hopefully now you know what is a social ping and you can use them to boost your business. If you have any questions please leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer.

Remember, it’s best to forget about chasing a certain number of social shares. Instead, focus on finding the people who really want to read your content.

Build your social media profiles and interact with people like you would in person. Be friendly and over-deliver.

If you want to get someone’s attention online, do something nice for them; review their products, mention them in an article, share their content on social media, etc.

Sometimes all you have to do is share someone’s Tweet and they’ll share your article to their massive audience. It happens.

More importantly, focus on providing value and don’t be afraid to pay it forward. It will come back to you.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article, and if you learned something new, hit the share button. 

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