Drive traffic to your website with social media marketing. We saw the first-ever social media site “Six Degrees” back in the year 1997. It enabled registered users to create a profile and send a friend request to other users. In 1999, after the creation of blogging, social media sites began to explode in popularity.
I remember Hi5 and MySpace used to be very popular in 2004, they were reported to be the 1st and 2nd largest social networks in 2005, sadly these two were pushed out of the limelight by the two main giants of social media.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter in 2006 became very popular and are currently available to users all over the world. These two sites have ever since dominated the social media arena and remain the most popular social networks on the Internet as we speak. Other social sites like Tumblr, Pinterest are fast gaining popularity for specific social networking niches.
As a matter of fact, the easiest way to drive traffic to your website is by leveraging social media platforms. I have researched various ways you can drive traffic to your website with social media, my research is based on the understanding that many businesses have had great success applying the following strategies:
Drive traffic to your website with social media marketing
Curate Content
Content curation is as simple and as cumbersome as finding high-quality content and sharing it on your social media page. Buffer has a great formula for curating content. Why do people share content on social media? The simple answer to that is because of the sheer value it will bring to others. People will always share great content, no matter what. You must be familiar with saying “Content is king, and everything else is gravy!”, this is 100% true. If you can find and share the right content on your social media business page, you’ll have set a strong foundation to drive traffic to your website or landing pages.
There are many go-to sites — it could be a blog or a major news site, to find inspiration for your content. There is a blog post about 101 ways to source content ideas by KISSmetrics. Whenever you find content that resonates with what you are looking for, pause and ask yourself these questions — Is the content trendy? Is it interesting? Would it bring value to your business and your audience? If you answer “Yes” to all of these questions then that content is worth curating and sharing.
Furthermore, there are great tools to use for content curation i.e. Buzzsumo, Buffer, Trapt it, Feedly, Pinterest, Quora, Scoop it, MyCurator, Spundge, Ahrefs, SlideShare. These are popular tools that marketers use to curate content.
The Use of Images
Use high-quality and catchy images to grab the attention of your audience, place images between your articles or as featured images for your blog post. People will connect more with visual images than a plain text.
Optimize your social media post
Research on high-conversion keywords relating to your niche and use them in your post and updates strategically. To make this simple, use the “niche keywords” that are on your website (assuming your website is optimized for search engine visibility). If you optimize your post the same way, you optimize your webs pages, your post’s visibility will increase in search, enabling you to reach an even larger audience than your direct followers. Search engines like Google would reward you if you provide high-quality content for your audience.
Social Selling
What is social selling? It basically means using social media for the sole purpose it was created for: getting social with your followers, audience or prospective customers with the aim of getting them to respond to your marketing efforts.
Listen to your customers and know their concerns. Provide them with useful contents, for example, you could create an information bank on frequently asked questions (FAQs), Webinars, How-to guides, Surveys, Helpful Tips, Infographics, etc and share it with your followers and prospects.
Host special promotions and contests
You can host special promotions and contests to engage with your followers. However, ensure that your promotional posts are educational, informative and entertaining. By doing so, you will be increasing your exposure and possibly send traffic to your website.
Create a referral program
A referral program will not only build your brand but will also bring new users to your website. You can also consider incentivizing referrals, you can do that by yourself or with the help of a professional seo agency. How does it work? For instance, if someone refers 10 people to your website, they get rewarded for that. Keep the reward enticing to get more people to participate. A solar panel installation company ones offered a referral bonus of $10 and you can imagine the amount of traffic their website received by doing just that.
Perfect your pitch
When writing your posts, make sure that you are providing value to your audience, don’t just create a sales pitch, it is quite boring these days to see sales-pitch-only focused post, Instead, write posts that will teach your audience something new. You can include links to your website strategically on your posts, but do not make it so obvious. People are more likely to visit your website if your contents are valuable to them. Furthermore, for each of your post, include a call to action message, for example, if you provide newsletters, encourage your prospects to sign up. If it is the engagement you are seeking, encourage your audience to leave a comment. These are all in the effort of promoting, engaging and building a valuable relationship with your audience and prospects.
Participate in conversations
Whenever you provide your audience and prospects with share-worthy contents, they are most likely to respond to it, when they do, participate in the conversation in the best way possible ( keep it professional and relevant), most will be looking for information, send them in the right direction i.e. FAQs web page, how-to guides etc. Monitor your posts and engagements on a daily basis. Don’t take for granted little things like “thanking your audience for sharing your contents”. Be consistent in doing this, after all, this is what social media was created for.
Use Paid Ads
This is the most common way marketers and business owners use to drive traffic to a website. No doubt, paid advertising help to boost website traffic if done properly. You can create and optimize ads on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. You can boost posts and promote Tweets to a targeted audience. It is not as easy as it sounds, preferably, hire a digital marketing agency to assist you with this if you don’t have the technical expertise.
Website Design
What next after sending traffic to your website? I will highly recommend adding social sharing buttons in strategic places on your site’s design. If you use WordPress, there are many social media “like and follow us” plugins you can place on prominent places on your landing pages (products or services pages). Doing so will attract more customers in your buying circle.
Final Thoughts
I hope you have learned from this article how to drive traffic to your website with social media marketing? Keep in mind that the more social mentions (popularity) your business website or pages have, the easier it is to build traffic to your website. Almighty Google takes into consideration the social signals of a site or page when ranking websites or web pages. Yes, it requires a lot of time, money and resources, but it’s definitely worth it.
Summary
The power of social media in Marketing