Tumblr

My choice for creating shareable GIFs and funny memes that can send a large amount of reblogs, likes etc to your post.  The traffic that you get from Tumblr may not be the highest quality as with the type of viral shares that happen, not everyone that shares your post (hopefully you linked back to your website) will visit your site, and those that do may not be your target market.  Here is an example of a tumblr post that generated 535 notes and sent 53 viewers to the website that put that post out. Now, these funny gifs have little to do with “web design” but the title of the post “can’t touch my web design” was followed up with MC Hammer doing the Can’t touch me dance. And dancing dogs etc.  So that is rather funny.  Tumblr is a great platform for driving traffic.  If you create shareable, viral content like this, you can gain lots of visits and notes and shares that will help with strengthening the power of that Do Follow Link from Tumblr.

Reddit

A very difficult platform to master.  Shares or posts are voted up or down with Karma points.  If you are deliberately trying to make self promotional shares for the aim of driving traffic to your sight without providing value first, well then you will most likely get harassed by other Redditors or booted completely.  Here is a great getting started guide for reddit. If your post is helpful and gets upvoted a bunch, you can get loads of traffic from Reddit.  This traffic can be very niche specific and targeted if your post was in a very niche part of Reddit.

Facebook

Yeah I know boring right?  Well Facebook Ads are still one of the best ways to really drill down and get in front of those targeted potential customers.  You think all that data that you put up about yourself in college was just so your friends could know that you love Tommy Boy and that you love wake boarding?  Well maybe back in 2004 it was, but now that data is harvested for the (almost) sole intent of marketing things to you.  I do not market via Facebook ads currently but have dabbled with the interface and it is extremely targeted and for that I think, this is the king for paid social traffic.