Learn How To Generate Quality Traffic From Social Media

Getting people to your website through social media engagement can be tricky, especially if you’re on a limited budget and already attempting paid advertising. While paid social can certainly help boost your website traffic, how do you get people to go to your social channels?

As we all know, social media has the ability to be a major source of traffic to your site. The larger presence you build on social media, the more you can rely on steady social media traffic to your site.

How Do You Increase Social Media Traffic?

Increasing your social media traffic happens when you engage and build relationships on each network. Being readily available for customers, brand loyalists and potential buyers it helps you nurture these people through the purchasing process.

Each social network is different, but to get an immediate boost in your social traffic, there are some steadfast rules to follow for all your social channels. Remember that your content says everything about your brand, so make sure your blog posts, case studies or infographics go above and beyond to make the social sharing aspect greater.

To get your social media traffic rolling, follow these 12 steps to get people to your social channels and ultimately to your website:

1. Inspire Your Audience With Visuals

First impressions are essential. We always say “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but more times than not, visuals help us make decisions. In fact, Adobe’s Q4 2013 Index showed social media posts with images create 650% more engagement than text posts.

People want visual content to help make sure their purchasing decisions are valid. When customers are able to view a product video or demo, they are 85% more likely to make a buying decision right there when compared to reading a text review.

2. Optimize your social profiles

When people look to understand more about your brand, they turn to your profile or bio section. It should quickly communicate your brand value proposition while establishing your tone and style.

The more distinct your bio is – without sacrificing clarity – the more likely you can catch the attention of and resonate with your ideal audience.

Don’t make the mistake of writing your entire business story in your bio. Just a couple of lines will suffice. Then, connect the bio to your site with a call to action for your home or landing page.

3. Use social proof

You can also use social credibility to enhance your site’s value. Just like any review or testimonial, social proof brings the human voice into your brand experience. Whenever someone is about to make a purchase or is shopping for something they want, they look for reviews, recommendations, referrals, and input from others who have used the product or service.

Incorporate reviews, social comments, feedback, etc. into your social media content and website. Your about-us page can work well for this. Make sure to only use social proof you have permission to repurpose. Don’t forget to include third-party media coverage of your brand too.

4. Use less popular platforms too

If you want to fast-track your web traffic and social media focus, two actively growing social platforms could help depending on your audience and topics – Instagram, Pinterest and Reddit.

Master Instagram

On social media, you have to use visuals to drive traffic to your website. One of the best avenues for visuals continues to be Instagram. With more than 80 million photos and videos shared each day, there’s a lot of competition.

But when you’re able to create beautiful and engaging content on Instagram, businesses see a difference. According to data from Instagram, brands see the highest level of engagement (4.21%) on Instagram when compared to other social networks.

Nearly three-fourths of Instagram comments are made within two days of the post, which shows its high impact on on brand’s Instagram strategies.

Provide awesome visuals that not only stand out, but speak volumes about you, your product and your story. The best visuals on social media tend to include:

Vibrant colors and well-designed layouts
High-level photography
Visuals telling stories
Visuals showing products or services in a new light
Consistently on point and well-planned

Pinterest saw 478 million monthly users in the first quarter of 2021, a 30% year-over-year increase. For content marketers, Pinterest proves its power in consumer discovery of trends and community-based features. It’s also a good platform for brands targeting women as they represent six out of 10 Pinterest users.

Skyram Technologies generates traffic by pinning its blog posts to Pinterest. Given the visual orientation of the platform, the brand used their own images, including infographics, for some posts and stock photos for others.

Reddit and its 52 million daily active users represent another social opportunity. You can easily find subreddits (i.e., forums) in your niche. Engage in the conversations. Post your own queries, share long-form educational perspectives, and comment to cultivate connections. If people find your advice helpful, they will want to explore more and likely to turn to your site.

TIP: Don’t use Reddit for direct promotion and marketing. Provide value. No one wants to read a written advertorial with a self-serving purpose. That likely will yield negative comments in the forum.

5. Time it right

You can’t drive traffic to your site if you post social content when no one engages. Pick the most effective time for optimal views. Instead of using best practices for social post timing, look at your own data. See when your target audience is most responsive. You can use automatic schedulers like Tailwind to suggest optimal posting times based on your profile’s specific algorithm and analytics.

Participate in Social Groups

Join active community groups where you find high chances of getting your target audience. You can find people with the same interests and identify their inclination towards your products. You can join these groups on Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp, LikedIn, and Pinterest. These groups can help you potentially drive traffic to your site.

Jot down what interests, characteristics, and personalities, your target market is comprised of. For instance, if you are a retailer of sports shoes, your target audience should be sportsperson and youth. So, it would help if you found online groups which have the same audience. Join such groups as an individual and then promote yourself as an influencer. This way you can improve your products and introduce them to your online store.

This is a smart way to become an influencer and promote your products and business on a larger scale.

Get Inspiration from Influencers:

The social media influencers are creating a significant impact in this digital world. Influencers are often referred to as “online celebs”. They have a huge followers count and immense popularity on social media. They have the power to influence the way their followers think. They have a big network of followers through their channels like social media, blogs, YouTube, etc.

You must identify the top social media influencers to boost your sales. The key to building this strategy is to find the right influencer to endorse your brand and products.

6. Use Social Media Plugins & Buttons

Get readers to share your content by using social media plugins. There are various plugins that can help you spread your content via social media much easier. One of the avenues is using click to Tweet, which allows readers to highlight parts of your content to share on social without leaving the page.

Secondly, you have to include social media buttons that are mobile friendly and don’t distract your readers while scrolling. According to Slate and Chartbeat, most readers only make it halfway down page, which means you have to optimize where you want to place your social media buttons.

Use free heat map plugins like SumoMe (for WordPress) to see where people are clicking the most on your blog content. Once you have a good idea of an area with high click volume, add your social share buttons there to immediately increase traffic.

Let’s say a person came across your blog post and absolutely loved the content. They ponder sharing it, but glance and don’t see an easy way to do that. They leave.

To prevent that from happening – and encourage sharing of your content – embed sharing buttons close to your content. Show the number of shares to date as proof that others find it worth sharing too.

7. Promote your content

Often, content marketers don’t use social media enough to promote blog or other relevant content on their sites. You don’t want to tout your content all the time, but you should promote all high-quality blog posts to increase their visibility.

To drive traffic to your site, publish excerpts or teasers on social media along with a link. That can incentivize the viewer to go to your website to read more.

Social media also is a good place to promote older but still relevant content that will intrigue new followers.

8. Engage your audience

Make sure your social media content revolves around your target audience instead of you. Offer content that’s valuable to them. Engage and inspire them to help them achieve their objectives.

Focus on asking open-ended questions when creating content to boost engagement. Ask questions that trigger a reaction. Ask yes-no questions or go multiple-choice style. Host a poll. Organize interactive quizzes and award prizes for winners.

This means too much self promotion and not enough engagement. Before you shrug off talking to your audience, consider this:

1 in 3 people go to competitors when ignored on social
34% of people choose social media as their top choice for customer care
An average of 957 messages in Q1 2018 require a response (up 18% from Q1 2020)
Only 11% of people receive replies from brands

While you don’t need to spend every waking moment waiting to answer your customers, you have a duty to provide the best customer experience. And that could be as simple as replying back to customer questions or concerns.

9. Be responsive

Make an effort to reply to every comment on your social posts. That makes your audience feel valued, and sometimes your response can include a link to your website, which offers more information on the topic.

Expediting your responses can also be a brand differentiator. Another company could have a higher marketing budget or create better content, but if you’re responsive, engaging, and genuinely build relationships, your brand is going to win.

Incorporate customer service into your social media so your brand can respond to queries and complaints promptly. The customer’s experience not only matters to them, but it offers proof to prospects on how your company is going to treat them too.

10. Get visible

Social media users respond to visuals better than text-only, from images and infographics to videos and presentations. They are a suitable medium to develop an emotional connection or trigger a strong reaction. They can also make your content more interactive or easier to consume.

Use images as standalone entries or alongside text. Avoid stock imagery in favor of more authentic images that help viewers connect more to the people in or served by your company.

Infographics can reimagine your content in a refreshing way. They are especially helpful to translate detailed or complex information. Make sure the data is easy to consume at first glance. Otherwise, you probably won’t see the boost in shares that infographics can provide.

Don’t forget video – recorded and live. As Vertical Measures’ Arnie Kuenn explains: “(I)f you aren’t consistently producing videos on all of your social media platforms, you are already far behind the competition. Focus on creating content that aligns with your customer journey and considers content amplification. The more users that make a connection with your brand, the more engagement, and followers you will ultimately receive.”

Live videos have been shown to bring even better interactions. How about hosting a Q&A session every week to interact with your audience? It could be a standard live format or you could ask the audience to submit questions in advance to ensure you’re properly prepared to answer them. You can also create video webinars or similar presentations and design them to convert viewers to your website.

11. Know When Your Audience Is Listening

The key to building follower count is all within consistency. The more consistent you are with your social media publishing, the higher chance you have at being seen. Once you start to see a spike in social media traffic, you shouldn’t slow down on your posting.

Keeping a daily publishing schedule is crucial to effective social media traffic building. Make sure you know roughly how much to post to each site and at what times. Some insights on how much to post:

Post on Facebook 3-10 times a week
Tweet at least five times a day
Instagram around 1.5 times a day
Post on LinkedIn 2-5 times a week

12. Research Your Competitors

Finding out how well your competitors are doing is a tried and true marketing strategy. The same notion should be in place for your social strategy.

Social media competitive analysis simply helps you dissect your social media traffic. You can easily locate key performance metrics and see how similar audiences respond to competitors’ social posts.

Try to get as much insights from your competitors first. This give you a better idea what it takes to build an audience on social. You never want to directly copy your competitors, but the analysis can shape your own strategy.

Try to figure out things such as:

Successful post times and days
Most engaging social channels
How often they respond to their comments
Types of content published (images, videos, quotes, etc.)

You can completely surprise yourself with what a little bit of digging will tell you about your industry.

Know Exactly What’s Engaging Followers

As we’ve discussed, engagement is absolutely essential to social media. With competitive analysis, you have to know how your rivals successfully engage with their followers. Try to what type of content is driving the mont comments, clicks, impressions and shares. This can give you a better idea into your own social media content planning.

Additionally, you can use Sprout Social’s Twitter analytics software, you’ll have a clear comparison of your Twitter handle against a competitor. You can also stack two competitors against one another to see who is posting engaging content.

Managing Your Social Inbox

Increasing your social media traffic starts with you efficiently managing your social channels. Social media is a two-way street, so don’t hurt your traffic by making it a one-way strategy.

Drive more traffic

These nine helpful social media tactics can drive more traffic to your site. If you’re consistent in your efforts, you eventually will start noticing results.