One of the main reasons you should use social media marketing is to increase your website traffic. This is not theoretical; if used correctly, social media can become a great traffic source to help you establish a successful online business or blog.
When discussing ways to increase traffic, it’s always useful to provide real examples to convince the reader that the proposed methods work and are not just another myth but deliver real results.
Of course, to get to a point where you can showcase your success with social media marketing, you need to work hard and consistently over some time while at the same time using the correct approach and tools.
Below is an example from a client website that gets a decent amount of monthly traffic from social media. I cannot publish the website URL for confidentiality purposes, but I can show screenshots from my analytics account. The main takeaway is that social media marketing does work and can generate a lot of traffic.
15 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Drive Traffic to a Website
When running a social media campaign to drive traffic to your website, consider the following tips:
1. Add your website’s URL to your social media profiles
Make sure that on all your social media profiles, you have a link pointing to your website. It may sound obvious, but there are cases in which this is ignored. Adding a link is not only good for SEO purposes but also for getting more traffic.
2. Use #hashtags effectively
Hashtags can generate more exposure for your social media postings. Look at some of the best practices for using hashtags, and ensure you use them correctly.
3. Utilize social media advertising
The number of social media pages and users is increasing daily, and while this is good because more potential users will view your postings, it also makes it harder to get your posts in front of your followers.
An active social media user will probably follow a dozen pages and hundreds of people, but the timeline can only show a limited number of posts.
Getting organic visibility for your postings (especially if you are posting as a business) is becoming more difficult. Facebook has changed its algorithm many times, and it only shows your posts to a fraction of your followers. So, the only way to get your message in your followers' timelines is to utilize Facebook advertising.
This does imply a cost, but it is an effective way to target the right audience and get even better results than organic. In addition, Facebook tracks everything, and you can use the data to further improve your advertising campaigns.
The same applies to Twitter and LinkedIn. You can connect with your followers using promoted tweets or LinkedIn ads.
4. Make it easy for users to share your content
When visitors read something on your website that they like, they may want to share it with their friends or social media followers. Thus, you should make it easy for them to do that by having properly configured social media buttons on your website or blog.
Many people make the common mistake of adding social media buttons without checking that the content is shared correctly. When you click to share a post, the title, description, and image should be well formatted; otherwise, users will not spend time fixing things before they click the share button.
5. Use images with your posts
Images, videos, and other visual items (infographics, illustrations) are more shareable. For you, this means two things. The first is to ensure that images are within your content so that when shared, the image goes with the posting.
The second is to include images as well when posting on your social media pages. All networks (including Twitter) allow you to add images to your updates, so make sure that you take advantage of this.
6. Add links to your social media postings
You need to add links to your social media profiles and postings. A good posting has an attractive title, a short description, an image, and a link to the original source.
7. Post Regularly
You don’t want to spam your followers with many daily postings, but making regular updates will give you more exposure and traffic. According to statistics, the recommended number of postings per day per social network is:
- Pinterest: 5 postings
- Twitter: 3 postings
- Facebook: 2 postings
- Instagram: 2 postings
8. Don’t over-promote your products or company
When posting on your business pages, don’t always post about your product or services. Your followers may get bored reading about your company's benefits all the time. Instead, try to make your posts interesting and useful for them. Your first goal is to retain your followers and then convert them.
For example, if you plan to make 5 postings per week, try to do 4 posts that are useful and interesting but still related to your products and post only once about your offers or benefits.
9. Create a blog and publish evergreen content
Reading the above tips, you can easily conclude that social media success depends on content. To be able to post on Facebook 2 times per day, you need to have a lot of good content you can share.
One solution is to use content from other websites (by linking to them, not stealing their content), but this will drive traffic to their website and not yours, and this is a problem.
To get traffic to your website, you need to share content. The best way to do that is to create a blog and publish high-quality, evergreen content. Evergreen content is always relevant and a great raw material for social media machines.
10. Connect with industry influencers
Spend some time and find people/pages that are considered social media influencers in your industry. These are usually the accounts that have a lot of followers and engagement with their postings.
Although the chances of getting followed by them are minimal (until you grow a decent social media profile), it’s good to know what they are doing, sharing, commenting, and generally what is trending in your industry.
Re-sharing their content and mentioning and commenting on their postings is a good way to get noticed and establish trust.
11. Don’t just post content, but manage your social media accounts
Posting content alone will not get you far with social media. Even if you publish fantastic posts, nobody will see them until you have enough followers on your social media accounts or unless you use advertising.
How do you get more followers? By managing your accounts. In other words, you can reach out and connect with people through the profile of your potential customer or reader. It’s a time-consuming process because you need to keep track of who to follow, who followed you back, and who did not remove them and start over again.
12. Spy your competitors
Although the word spy is not the best word to use in this case, it would be nice if you looked at your close competitors and saw what they are doing on social media. How often do they post, what kind of content do they use, what is their following, what is their growth rate, etc.? You may also get a few ideas to use in your social media campaigns.
13. Measure results
Use Google Analytics to measure how many visits you get from social media. You can find the report under ACQUISITION / ALL TRAFFIC / CHANNELS. Record the number of visitors from each social network per month, analyze which network works best for your business or blog, and spend more time on that.
Besides Google Analytics, you can also use statistical data from Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and the tools you use to schedule/publish your posts on these social networks.
14. Reply to comments or mentions
Monitor your social media accounts and reply to comments and mentions of your brand. Showing users that you are active on social media encourages more engagement. For example, if someone retweets one of your tweets, send them a thank-you message. If you get a comment on your FB post, reply to the comment, answer their question or thank them for the comment.
15. Create a social media strategy
All the above tips are part of your overall social media marketing strategy. A successful strategy should also include details about your social media goals, target audience, content marketing plan, and other ways to measure the ROI from your social media efforts correctly.
Conclusion
Social media marketing can bring traffic to a website, and like any other online marketing technique, it is a process that needs a lot of effort, time, and hard work. Social media is not supposed to replace SEO, but they can work together harmoniously by supporting each other’s methods.
