One of the ways you can use sites like Facebook and Twitter is to share other people’s content. Share information that is relevant and of good quality and it can help you build a reputation for being someone with their finger on the pulse in your niche; the go-to person for the best recommendations and advice.

The downside of sending your social media readers to other people’s content is that they may not return. However, there is a tool that allows you to send people to great content while also creating the opportunity to direct them to your own website once they have consumed the content you recommended.

The tool is called Sniply and for a limited time you can use it free for an entire year. Usually it costs $300 for 5,000 clicks per month, but for now you just need to submit your email address to get access.

Sniply produces a pop-up that appears on the web page you’ve recommended on Facebook or Twitter. The colour and shape of the pop-up can be customised so it suggests your branding, and you also have a number of choices for where the pop-up appears on the screen.

Add your picture (which could be your gravitar) to the pop-up, specify which page you want people to visit after they’ve read the content you recommended and it’s ready to use.

So now you can send your readers to other people’s websites while giving yourself the opportunity to redirect that traffic back to your own site. There are a number of ways you can use this opportunity. For example, you could have a line of text in the pop-up that says something like ‘Would you like to know how to…?’, while the button says ‘Yes’. When they click they are sent to a relevant blog post, an offer, or an opt-in page for a resource.

It seems a great opportunity and the only drawback I can see is if it is overused and readers become blind to it or resent its presence. Much like other pop-ups, yet admittedly they still work well enough to be considered a viable tool.

Once Sniply is set up and you’ve started to use it there is a dashboard that allows you to track how effective it is at sending people to your own pages. This a useful feature as it will enable you to decide whether it is working well enough for you to invest in once the free year subscription expires.

For more information see http://www.appsumo.com/sniply/