We all know that being successful in the social media sites can drive huge bursts of web traffic to a website, but once that initial burst of hysteria has vanished, what are the other sources of value?

1 – Higher Ranking in Google

Social media success will drive lots and lots of backlinks from other bloggers, forums and websites. Those links will boost your search engine rankings and therefore give you improved Google traffic for years to come.

We did a self improvement post at our sister site, and within 72 hours we were top 3 for this highly competitive search term: Self Improvement Advice.

This is a ranking we wouldn’t have been able to achieve so quickly with standard SEO techniques.

2 – Second Wave Traffic

Second wave traffic is a term devised by Dean Hunt. Dean has had more viral and social media successes than any other marketer on the net, and his studies have shown that there is a second wave of web visitors that arrive within a few days of the first burst of traffic.

This second wave is not as big as the first, but it often lasts longer.

For example, you hit the Digg.com mainpage and get 50,000 visitors in 24 hours.

The second wave starts 72 hours later due to mentions on hundreds of blogs etc… and you get an average of 4,500 per day for 15 days.

Most marketing experts don’t even know that this second wave exists, but if we compare the numbers: 4,500 per day x 15 days = 67,500 which is higher than the initial burst.

3 – Increased Pagerank

I am going to keep this simple… more backlinks = higher Google Pagerank. Social media is the easiest way to get tons of backlinks.

4 – Increased Authority

The first time someone sees your blog they will be sceptical, the second time they stumble across it they will curious, by the 5th time they have found your blog they will presume you are a huge authority site.

A fast track to authority is via social media.