5 Steps to Drive Traffic to Your Site Through Social Media

Introduction

You've probably heard social media is a popular way for companies to participate with their target audiences. Perhaps you will post on Facebook or respond to a couple tweets. What is the big deal?

92 percent of small business owners using social media consider it important for their company.

Why?For starters, social media can help you build brand recognition, foster a community around your company, and grow your bottom line.

And, with the amount of global social networking users expected to hit 2.5 billion this year, there has never been a better way to find and connect with your perfect audience.

So how do you use social media to help your organization? You can begin by driving traffic to your site. Below I will share eight easy and effective methods to help you do precisely that!

Getting Started with Social Media for Business

If you are just entering the world of social websites for company, you may assume the only options you have are the giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

These are fantastic options (and essential!) For any sort of business, but there are other alternatives worth looking into too.

For example:

Pinterest -- to share visual content, like pictures and infographics from your site

Reddit -- to establish your knowledge in an industry, and participate with a dedicated community

Tumblr -- to make a multimedia journal to support your main site

Google+ -- to share content on Google's own platform (and boost SEO!)

Snapchat -- to record behind-the-scenes of Your Company through video

But with all these platforms, each offering different items, how do you decide which to focus on?

Follow your clients.

Research the demographics for each stage (data for many are in point #2 of the Key Statistics webpage ).

Who tends to use that stage most? Do these demographics fit inside your buyer personas? If so, add it to your list and get to work!

The Significance of Targets

Like any marketing effort, based on your social networking activity should be goals and metrics (or Key Performance Indicators, if we are getting fancy).

This is how you will measure success, and determine whether the platform you are working on is really effective. There is not much point in investing time into Pinterest, by way of instance, once your perfect customer is not busy there, right?

Aims could be anything from increasing your amount of followers Xpercent in six months to raising traffic by [50%].

Whatever you decide your objective is, stick with it and refer back to it frequently. Do not allow it to be another never-again visited file that slides into the base of your Google Drive.

For the remainder of this post, I will concentrate on a single goal: driving visitors. Here is how you can do it!

How to Drive Website Traffic Through Social Networking

1. Fill in your profile.

What is the first thing people see when they click your social networking page?

Your profile!

Whether it is your Twitter bio, Facebook About department or LinkedIn company page, your profile reveals visitors information about your organization.

That makes it the ideal place to tell everyone a bit about your organization, and drop a link to your site.

Social media today drives 31 percent of referral traffic. You can find a piece of that action with the addition of these backlinks to your website.

If folks are interested in the sort of content you are sharing and discussing, they will probably be interested in finding out where they could get more.

Does this backlink give readers an opportunity to click-through to find out what you are all about, but you will have created another visitor to your website, just like this!

Action Step: Make sure there's a link to your site's homepage on all your social networking profiles.

2. Boost your blog content.

You put tons of effort into writing content to your site, and want the world to see your most recent masterpiece. However, before you know it, two weeks have passed and only few individuals have feasted their eyes on it.

What's there for creating great content if folks are not going to read it? You can correct this by promoting your articles on social networking.

It has been discovered that brands who produce 15 blog articles per month (and share that content via social media) average 1,200 new leads per month -- demonstrating it is not impossible to receive your content seen by perfect clients.

Of course, you do not need to create 15 blog articles per month until you can share your articles on social networking and begin seeing tangible results.

You can begin promoting at any stage, with any piece of content.

After all, you are constantly building your profile, and current followers may have missed articles you published weeks ago.

Start by developing a social networking schedule that promotes your previous content. You can do this automatically using tools such as Buffer, Social Jukebox, and Hootsuite.

You can also repurpose your blog posts for more use from them.

Options include:

Quoting different snippets of your article

Asking your target audience questions that are relevant to the article

Varying your selection of pictures

Shifting the headline of your article every 2-3 months

Promoting your site content with many different messages will keep your feed refreshing and attract your target audience to your site.

Action Step: For every blog post on your website, create a record with an extra 5-10 blog post titles. Add these to a social scheduling tool, as well as the URL of your article, to drive traffic back to old blog articles.

3. Make your content easy to share.

What's much better than knowing people are reading your site content? Seeing that they have shared it with their friends and colleagues!

Odds are you have spent a part of your lunch break or day surfing Facebook.

You have seen a friend share a fascinating link or movie, and you have clicked-through to find out more.

That is the identical level of sharing you should be boosting for your own content.

Permit -- and encourage -- present website visitors to share content hosted on your own blog by embedding a societal sharing tool.

Some will even reveal the number of shares earned by each article, like this case on Social Media Examiner:

Over 41 percent of people measure the societal influence of a site by the amount of shares it receives. If you are making this information readily available to your website visitors, it might build trust and result in higher conversion rates later in the purchasing cycle.

You might also include Click to Tweet buttons so readers can quickly share interesting facts or snippets with their own followers (and link back to your own content, too ).

This option will not exhibit the share count, but it provides people an incentive to share. Not everyone has the time to craft copy for their societal upgrade, so why not provide them with it to take that stress away?

Action Step: Install a plugin which shows social shares on your site, such as Cresta's Social Share Counter or AddThis. Viewers will have the ability to share your articles with the entire world with the click of a button.

4. Post once your audience is busy.

What good is posting on social websites if your intended audience is not online to see it? Sure, you might find some hits, but are they likely to care what you need to say? Or will they just contribute to your ever-increasing bounce rate?

The best time to post on social media is if your target audience is the most busy -- their"peak time."

When originally building your social plan, follow these general guidelines for when it is best to post on social websites:

As soon as you're more established, begin testing the waters to see what times drive the most engagements and click-throughs.

Followerwonk is a fantastic (free!) tool that can help with this step. It decides what time of day your audience is the most active, letting you tailor your posting program around their everyday routines.

Just hit the Analyze tab, enter your Twitter manage and choose"Examine their followers".

Here are the results for my Twitter profile:

As soon as you've gathered this information, optimize your posting program around your followers' action! Schedule posts that attract your audience most during those blocks of time, and attempt to be active when your audience is online.

Action Step: Use the Followerwonk instrument to analyze if your audience are active. Then construct your advertising strategy around it.

5. Concentrate on sharing visual content.

It's easy to scroll endlessly through a social networking feed and miss content which may be interesting or helpful. Cease potential website visitors from doing exactly the same by sharing visual content that stands out.

Were you aware that visual content is 40 times more likely to receive shared on social media than other kinds of content?

Additionally, tweets with graphics received 150 percent more retweets than those without. Therefore, if you are using visual images on Twitter, you can position your articles (and site links!) Facing more ideal clients.

Add components like:

Graphs

Infographics

GIFs

Videos

Photos

Animations

These can make your audience more likely to click your societal upgrade, and share it !

Here's a Wonderful example of Fieldboom using visuals in their social posts, which link to blog posts to drive traffic:

However, you might also benefit from sharing links to your website, together with your fancy images, on visual content sharing platforms like Visual.ly, Flickr, and Pinterest. If every post includes your site's URL, you are set to see a surge in traffic.

Action Step: Use Canva to make a picture for each primary social channel you're trying to drive traffic from. You can edit a template that is optimized for each platform, or build one from scratch.