Simple Solutions to Building Traffic 4
Picking out the Right Social Media Platform for you Business 8
The Right Content to post on Social Media 11
Posting: When and How Often? 13
How frequent can you post without being viewed as Spam by the audience 14
Tailoring your Message to fit the different Social Media Platforms 17
Traffic Increasing Strategies on Social Media 18
Making Use of Hashtags for increased reach 21
Interaction with the relevant social network communities and groups 22
Include the link and information to your website on your social media, and the link to your social media on your website 24
Pay attention to the Industry Influencers and keep them Engaged 25
The Visual Component of Social Media 26
Images 27
Videos 28
Infographics 29
Memes 30
Screenshots 31
Social Media Automation 32
How do I get traffic from my social media to my website? How to I increase my followers as well as my likes?
There are sometimes that one may manage to get traffic to the site, however, after a while the law of large numbers begins to apply and you start to ask yourself:
How will I be able to increase the traffic to my site day in day out in a consistent manner?
If these are some of the questions that you may be having then you need not worry! This guide will assist you in finding answers to the questions that you may have with regards to increasing traffic to the site using social media.
Once of the chief principles that you shall learn in this guide is how to develop a social media strategy and comprehending the elements that have an impact on the strategy for it to come to fruition as well as adapt over time.
At this point you may be curious as to how exactly social media may drive traffic. Here is how it happens:
- Social media engages the viewers and at the same time offers them content that is useful, interesting or relevant to them.
- Social media also allows the users to conduct surveys. For businesses this is a wonderful opportunity to connect with the audience or the customers by asking them questions. This helps the consumers to feel more connected to the company.
- Interacting with the audience allows the company to get feedback on products, policies, campaigns and all sorts of relevant material. This feedback can then be analysed and helps the business to adjust the marketing strategy where necessary.
- Social media enhances brand recognition. By displaying the product on the social media networks, this ensures that the brand is placed in display for a number of potential buyers in the event that they logged on to seek out your services. This will provide them with a further incentive to purchase your product.
- Social media also helps a business to associate with the industry influencers. By making use of social media the business is able to expand its overall professional reach and that of its partners and collaborators. Therefore the brand is associated with the industry influencer and thus becomes a pivotal or influential source of information as well as advice and dissemination of website content.
- Social media can also be used by businesses to enhance customer retention as well as brand loyalty. There is no argument that social media is one of the most effective feedback tools given that characteristically it is a medium that allows the users to get more social, and get feedback that is sincere and unapologetic from the audience and customers. This allows the business to get more information about the target audience in a very easy manner, and at the same time the audience also gets to know the business brand which enhances the overall conversion and loyalty rates.
- Social media proliferation has gotten to a level that it almost expected by the public that any reputable company should have a Facebook and a Twitter page. This is because this is the most effective and easiest way that the customers can
contact the business and have access to reliable information. The implication of this is that the company or the business gets more credibility and the customers trust it more. A business with a social media page looks a tad bit more legitimate and the more popular the brand on social media the more credibility the business will have
It is important that one picks out the most appropriate social media channel for your business; you should make that the medium that you have chosen is aligned with your specific business goals and ideals. Here is where you can employ the use of the S. M. A. R. T. Strategy to ensure that you create objectives that are measurable.
You should endeavour to research your key target market. Get information about the composition of your demographics such as the location, gender, age, religion, income, education level, ethnicity, number of children, and marital status. This information will help you to identify the various personas of your buyers and all their probable mediums in as far as social media is concerned.
It is worth noting that while there is a need for the brand to be recognized as quickly as possible, this does not necessarily mean that your business should be on all the social media platforms. On the contrary, you should only focus on the ones that will help you accomplish the goals that you
have set for yourself. It is also important to note that while setting up a social media page is almost often free, maintaining the page is quite intensive with respect to time management and resource allocation. For business to consumer (B2C) models, you are advised to make use of Facebook and Twitter as they are the most effective for these types of interactions.
Let us take a hypothetical situation. Let us imaging that you are the owner of a local bar and restaurant. You then go online and search for a popular hashtag like “beer”, the result of this search will be a list of what people within your location are talking about with regard to your services. This will further allow you to interact with the users that are posting about these services and provide them with offers through a simple @ sign. This is an example of Business to Customer as in this case you would have interacted directly with the customer or client and provided them with whatever it is that they needed.
When it comes to Business to Business types of interactions, Linkedin is one of the best ways to facilitate this among the social media platforms. The manner in which the personnel from Link Humans present the overall need as well as benefits of social media in as far as Business to Business interaction is concerned is quite interesting. It is important to note that even in this situation where the interaction is business to business, the human element is quite important, in fact it is a core element. When broken down to their constituent parts you will find that businesses are groups of people and if you can be successful in attracting the people behind the business then by extension the business will find you interesting. They key point here is to market yourself to be very attractive to the end user.
Google + is quite beneficial when it comes to drumming up traffic for posts that confer some sense value. On the other hand, Pinterest mainly focuses on the visual component such as the photographs and inforgraphs; basically it is all medium that would be visually relevant and
informative to the brand. Instagram has gain a significant deal of popularity in the recent past; retailers in particular have given this social media network a warm reception as it provides them with the perfect opportunity to display the products that they have for almost no cost.
SlideShare is another platform that comes highly recommended as it allows you to provide the users with heavy and complex information in a manner that they will comprehend with ease. Often, you will find that people visit SlideShare to consume information that is difficult or complex, to find solutions to specific problems, and of course, to have a sample of some great presentations on display.
Now that you have successfully created a page that is pleasing to the eye and looks professional, the next bit of work is to come up with content that you can publish to your audience. This might come off as a simple endeavour on the face of it but now that you are at this juncture you might be asking yourself, “How does one do that?” Ideally, the first step would be to research on what the competition is posting. The aim is not to mimic but to find out what the audience is being fed with and the reception they are giving to that kind of information. Following which you should strive to do better than the competition!
It may take a number of tries but eventually you will find what is referred to as your tone or voice. Now you can sit down and develop a posting strategy that is geared towards enticing the audience and to spark interaction with them. Do not be bogged down on one thing or try and focus too much on what others are doing, at first you should focus on what works for you or what you are good at. For instance, if Photoshop and Photography are your strong suites then you should start by sharing pictures and images on Instagram and Pintrest.
There are a number of softwares that you can make use of that will make your work easier. The following list is just but a number of the content generating tools that you may find handy when they are at your disposal:
- Skitch is a tool that is good when one is working with screen shots
- Inforgram is designed to suit all your infographics needs
- Canva is an exceptional tool for images, and
- MyBlogU is a tool that you can use when you want to brain storm for ideas for your social media content.
Research has shown that of all the content on social media platforms, images and other forms of visual elements such as videos and gifs tend to get a better reception by the audience which is often in the form of clicks, views, retweets and likes. Facebook and Twitter are two of the most popular social media platforms and here photos receive 54 per cent more likes, 103 per cent more comments and 84 per cent clicks as compared to other content that is posted without visual content.
With that information in mind, it is important that you aim to tap into the potential of visual content. Ergo, you should always make sure that you have included images, videos, short texts, hashtags and emoticons wherever you deem appropriate in order to create more interaction. You can focus on posting images and links; you can retweet, you can post exceptional quotes for your audience. A good tactic to entice your audience would be to ensure that you diligently post the same content for all days of the week except for one where you post a different content. The aim of this would be to observe the overall impact that this would have on the audience engagement.
Now that you have figured out the right kind of content for your audience, it is time to consider other parameters such as the time and the frequency of posting. Let us begin with the time element. The best time to post on social media may prove to be a difficult thing to accomplish simply because your given page may have and audience from all over the world and therefore there may not be an exact sweet spot with respect to time for posting across all social media networks. Timing is important because you will often want to post your content at the high traffic times on the Social Media platforms simply because it is at these times that there will be an increased likelihood that your content will be seen by the most number of people thus translating to better results.
It is understandable when you would like to post your content as frequently as possible to ensure that the audience as had a good look at what you have to offer. After all, the whole point of the exercise is to ensure that your content is viewed by as many people as possible, right? Well, it appears that there is a limit to how frequently you can post without irritating your general audience and causing them to view you as a spam messenger.
Admittedly, this tactic of flooding the timeline with information may have some good results in the short run which is exhibited in the form of clicks, it is not a sustainable strategy and you should definitely avoid it. If your posts border on the extreme in terms of frequency, then the users will develop a habit of ignoring you, or will ultimately unfollow you. However, if you are looking to share your content more than once, there are a few ground rules that you can use to ensure that your content does not become in appropriate. The following tips should help you in this endeavour:
- Always consider your followers. It is often the case that we can be caught in the desire to get more clicks that we forget how it is to use social media and one content is flooding your timeline. It is often irksome. Therefore, remember the social feed that you are providing is not meant to be consumed by you but by them.
- Avoid becoming a Spammer. There is no need to explain how spam messages are often annoying. Therefore, avoid becoming an annoying spammer by coming up with a schedule that is smart as opposed to one that is largely crowded.
- Take into account your won habits. It would prove to be helpful to reflect on your own habits when you are using social media. At what point do you deem something to be a spam? Use this logic to ensure that you do not cross the aforementioned line.
- Do not post anything that you wouldn’t appreciate. Try and put yourself in a neutral position and imagine how you would react if you witnessed someone with an identical strategy as yours. This should be the barometer that you would use to analyse if the strategy you are employing is appropriate or not. This is because there is a high chance that you are not the only one who would feel the same way.
- Always aim to offer value. As it was earlier mentioned, there is nothing wrong in posting content more than once provided that you are reposting this content with an aim to provide value to your audience. If the aim is simply to flood the timeline then probably you should consider reducing the frequency of posting.
If you decide to follow these simple tips then you should be in a position to develop great social media content that would promote traffic to your site without it becoming a tad too repetitive for your users.
This is a topic that has been of great discussion in the recent past. There has been a tendency among new marketers where they tend to promote the same content across all the social media networks.
For instance, let us imagine that you came up with a wonderful blog post and that you decided to share it on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google+. If you decide that you would post the same message to accompany the said blogpost on all your social networks, then the individuals that would view your content on multiple mediums will just scroll past it.
In addition to that, we had mentioned earlier that every platform is unique in terms of the kind of content that flourishes there. Therefore content will be different in structure and appearance from medium to medium and therefore you need to adapt your content in order for it to fit that particular platform. For instance, there are no hashtags on Linkedin and at the same time there is no snippet on Twitter. It is the nuances that will prove to be the difference in the end.
What are the repercussions if you share content more than once? Well to be honest the jury is still out on this one as there are varied ideas as to whether you should post content more than once or not. However, this guide shall give you useful tips on how to work around this. This is very important as it may help you increase your traffic by almost two fold. It is a very basic concept and if you execute it in the right manner then it will pay off greatly.
To begin with, every time that you publish a post make sure to include a heading, hashtags, link and share it on all the networks. This is to ensure that this content is easily traceable, capable of trending through the hashtags and has content that can direct traffic to your site. However, most marketers will tend to overlook the fact that for each post there are usually very few people that will see it whenever it is posted let alone the target audience. The limiting factor here is their actual presence at the time in which the post has been published.
With respect to this you will have to share content that you deem to be valuable a number of times, sometimes 1 to 2 weeks from the initial date of posting. However, be very careful when you do this. Steer clear from the mistakes of spammers such as sharing your content every hour; if you flood the timeline of other users with your newsfeed will cause them to think that you are indeed a spammer and the result is that they will unfollow you. There is no need to force issues and then end up ruining the whole relationship altogether.
Additionally, it would not hurt if you were to add some sense of variety to your posts despite the fact that it is the same content. For instance you can ask questions or include some pull-up quotes form the actual post.
- Direct and Easy: Here is where you post a Title and a Link to the content that you are promoting
- The Question: Here is where you ask the audience an engaging question to spark a conversation and keep you content relevant and talked about
- State Facts: Share a fact or two accompanied with some figures in your post to add variety to your content
- Share a Quote: Extract a quote from the article you have written and convert it into a social message
- Add some intrigue: Publish a message that will tease the audience and grab their attention towards the content that you are publishing.
The beauty of this tactic is that it provides you with an excellent way in which you can try out all your new ideas on your followers. For instance, you may be concerned about various aspects of your strategy such as the efficacy of asking question in terms of increasing reader engagement.
It is also worth noting that this practice will provide you with an excellent opportunity to create and come up with new headlines from which you can choose which one works best for your content.
What you should do is create a group or two depending on your interests and also join a large number of groups and communities that are active and have some similarity or likeness to your specific niche. The rationale behind this move is that these groups and communities provide a vital source of traffic to your business website as a result of the community spirit and the underlying spirit behind the establishment of such groups and communities.
This is just but a helpful hint: post all the new content links in the groups and communities. However, try as best as you can to lose the sales pitch here because these groups and communities house people who are looking for value and they tend to be put off when they feel as if they are being sold something.
By joining the social media networks that are not known or rather those that are not so popular, you will get some sense of competitive edge by being among the first individuals or businesses that get to close a sale. The reasoning here is that if the medium is not crowded then you stand a better chance of standing out. It is also important that you seek out social networks that are engineered specifically for your type of trade; for instance, if you are an author or you sell books then GoodReads would be your ideal place to be. The benefit of social media platforms that have
similar interests as your business is that you do not have to go through the whole process of informing them what your product is all about and then proceed to making a sales pitch, they already have some sense of interest in your product or whatever it is you have to say.
Thus far we have been adamant about the subtlety of the sales pitch, however, when you ae adding buttons to your website do not forget to include the Buy Now button in all your social media pages. At the end of the day you are running a business!
Research has shown that social media content that contain some form of visual component have a higher likelihood of getting an increased sense of engagement as compared to posts that do not have a visual component. This goes to show that you stand a better chance of attracting more traffic to your social media page if you have more visual content.
If you are serious about embarking on a content marketing campaign then you need to be aware of what will stimulate engagement and ultimately growth. There is no argument that content that is based on text is forever going to be an integral component of marketing, however, in order to completely set yourself apart from the competitors in the digital era then the visual component must be a key element in all your endeavours.
If you take into account that over 65 per cent of individuals are categorized as visual learners, 90 per cent of all the information that comes to the brain is visual, and that presentations that have some sense of visual aid have a 43 percent chance of being more persuasive, then it makes complete sense to make use of content that your users will have an innate sense of resonance with it. The following are some of the types of visual content that you can make use of in your marketing in order to increase your traffic.
It has been shown that whenever you separate a body of text with some images that are compelling, there is a higher inclination of people to finish up what you have written on condition that the images that you have used are high quality and are relevant to the content. Marketers have observed that articles with images receive 94 per cent more traffic than those that do not have images. As a consequence of the influx of digital content and the accessibility of the internet with the use of mobile phones, attention spans have never been shorter, which makes content that is presented in large block a tad bit too off putting.
You are highly advised to make use of images that are original or rather images that you took by yourself because this tends to add a sense of personal touch to your content. However, high quality images tend to be expensive to buy or time consuming to create. However, this is not a cause for alarm as there are resources such as Canva that can allow you to create captivating and unique images for free. Also, at your disposal is a bountiful resource of photo-sharing sites such as Flick where you can acquire images for free. However, always ensure that you have sought the proper authority to use the images.
Videos are particularly useful when it comes to presenting problems that are common and then showcasing the solutions that your product has to offer. Admittedly, there are often cheaper alternatives for visual content that are available, a carefully though video can bolster up your marketing campaign by showing that you are willing to work the extra mile to offer more quality. There was a study that observed that by adding a video to one’s landing page enhanced conversations by a whopping 86 percent.
There are many kinds of videos that have the potential to enhance your business ranging from how-to videos, demonstrations, explainer videos, and testimonials. Regardless of your preference, it is vital to ensure that the video you choose are congruent with the personality and ethos of your brand.
If you need to condense all your complex data and statistics into a visual display that is compelling and easy to the eye then infographics are your best bet. Additionally, you can accompany infographics with promotional tools such as networking with the key influencers, optimizing your landing page and so on. In this way, infographics can become an integral part of your marketing campaign.
In order to get the most out of infographics, it is pivotal that the design and layout is made to have the most impact. The design mush have a combination of all the right colours, shapes and fonts in order to convey the data. The information that you select for the infographic must always be truthful, accurate and relevant. Sometimes even the most mundane data can get a fresh lease of life when they are conveyed using visualizations. However, it is important to note that your visual elements need to have some sense of narrative, it would be senseless to disrupt your narrative just to show your Adobe illustrator skills.
It has been noted that bloggers tend to be attracted to a good infographic, therefore if you can promote your infographic in an effective manner there is a likelihood that it will be circulated in the social media platforms thereby increasing the overall traffic to your website. The more shares that it gets the more publicity your brand receives. It is also important that you make a habit of including thumbnail images in addition to a hyperlink to your site in the social media. This will allow you to bypass all the size restrictions that may be imposed on the social media platforms.
Memes can be described as images that are have humorous captions inscribed. When memes started out, it was not perceived by many that they would have a pivotal role in content marketing as they were only meant to serve as an entertainment tool.
Making your own memes is a superb way of evoking emotions that are positive and also setting yourself apart from the competitors. To begin with, you must try to find out whether niches are suitable for your niche and whether they will get some sense of engagement or not. If your brand is appreciated mostly by the young people then there is a likelihood that memes would be appropriate.
A screenshot will allow you to provide your audience with a highlight of the internal workings of your service or product. It allows you to show them the functions that you can offer from a perspective that is direct and personal. You can also add a marketing copy and a testimonial or two in order to enhance your overall credibility.
Screenshots are often a great tool to corroborate claims that you are indeed providing the service that you make in your sales pitch. For instance, if your business is making an app and you have marketed the various functions that it performs, then a screenshot with a caption can be an excellent visual verification that your audience would need in order to have some sense of trust in your claims.
Despite the fact that screenshots appear to be the least captivating visual content that we have discussed, they can be extremely beneficial when used as a trust building tool. It would be beneficial if you were to view them as a tool to capture the customer feedback or their testimonials.
You might also want to automate your social media posts in order to get the best out of them. The benefit of automating social media posts is that it offers you the option of analysing the overall results of a given post at any time. There are numerous tools that you can make use of to automate your posts.
However, automating posts does not mean that you get to lay back and observe. Simply posting is not enough for a successful marketing campaign. You need to converse with the people that are interacting with your products.
Tracking your Results
It is very important that you have a way to track you results on social media. You can employ the services of Google Analytics social reports which will allow you to keep track of your social media traffic. You can then use this to come up with the next steps for your social media strategy.