Over the past few years, social media platforms have become so much more than just places to keep up with personal relationships.
They’ve become indispensable marketing tools for organizations.
Social media can be a largely significant player in helping your company generate more traffic to your website.
But why social media? How can social media traffic possibly make a difference for businesses?
As a brand, social media helps connect with your audience, build your brand on multiple platforms, gain credibility, bring awareness to your products or services, and increase your search engine optimization score.
A quality social media presence can actually be the difference between a business’s failure and success.
Here are seven tips for knowing how to use social media engagement to generate more traffic to your company’s website.
One of the most important things to know when using social media is what each social media platform is best used for, as well as what makes it unique and different from the other ones.
When you understand these factors, you’ll have a better understanding of which types of content to post to each social media platform – and ultimately, get much better engagement.
You need to know which social platform your customers spend most of their time on so you can generate a strategy.
For example, if you’re a company that sells video games, it wouldn’t make much sense for you to concentrate your social media marketing efforts on Linkedin or Instagram.
Instead, you’d want to focus on Raptr, WeGame or other places where passionate gamers like to hang out.
Social media platforms vary in terms of the best times and days to post. This is generally based on:
In general, the best time to post is considered 1-4pm and the worst is on the weekends before 8am.
However, there are some specific times according to MarketingHire that work well for each of the major social platforms.
Neil Patel also offers generic best times to post on social media.
HubSpot created an infographic that outlines best times to post on each social media channel.
If you understand the audience’s patterns of behavior, you’ll get much better social media engagement – which will lead to increased website traffic. Use an analytics tool to track post engagement until you find the best time slot to schedule your posts.
Posting at certain times ensures optimal activity on each post in terms of likes, followers, comments, and views – which means you’re engaging your social media followers, helping them learn more about your brand, and ultimately, enticing them to click through to your website.
Instagram has become the most influential social media platform for people and for businesses, and that power should be wielded accordingly – if it fits your business.
The trick to optimizing each Instagram post, along with mastering posting times, is through making your post discoverable.
This is done using hashtags.
Hashtags are great – but only if you don’t overuse them.
Instagram allows you to include 30 hashtags per post, but that doesn’t mean you should use all of them.
For example, some brands use popular irrelevant hashtags just to get followers, but this approach actually isn’t all that effective.
If you use a popular hashtag that’s relevant to your post, you’ll have much more success in gaining more followers and growing brand engagement than using several popular hashtags that don’t make sense for you.
Instagram does allow you to employ neutral hashtags that are widely used like “#followme,” “#like4like,” “#follow4follow,” “#tagsforlikes” or, if you have a particular picture you think is great, use the “#instagood” hashtag.
Using the right hashtags can be what grows your business’s Instagram account and, in turn, popularity. Increased popularity results in more traffic heading to your company’s website.
“Hashtagging” effectively is an art, and nothing you find online is likely to tell you exactly how to determine hashtags for your business’s posts.
However, you can learn which hashtags will drive traffic by doing your homework on Instagram’s hashtagging culture and studying the analytics of your posts to see which hashtags resonate.
Social media influencers are changing the marketing game, and businesses are starting to pay more attention to and setting aside more funds for utilizing them.
Influencers are people on social media who have used their own personal brand to create a strong, genuine following and popularity with the public.
Businesses send their products or offer their services to influencers in return for promotional space. It’s like getting a celebrity endorsement in a way.
The social proof of an influencer promotion can make a large number of people not only aware of your businesses, but also influence them to try out your products or services.
Influencers are powerful marketing tools and utilizing them properly can make all of the difference for your social media and, in turn, website traffic.
Any content you post on social media should be captivating.
Social media posts with aesthetically-pleasing or stunning imagery and clever, original, or inspiring text will get far more views, and as a result, audience engagement than mundane ones.
Successfully delivering this type of imagery and text regularly can be the first step in convincing people to stop scrolling for a few moments and consider what your company has to say.
In order to be engaging and generate leads, you need to get this one right. There are couple of mistakes that are easy to make. Being cognizant of these errors will help you avoid them.
People don’t have the time or the patience to read all of it. Keep it short and balance the visuals with text.
This one is a no-brainer: Everyone loves free stuff.
So use occasional giveaways for your products or services, but make sure the campaign is discoverable by the public. Then, watch people hop on board.
Require that, in order to enter into the giveaway, interested people like the post, follow your page, and/or share the post with their friends by tagging them or by posting the giveaway on their social media accounts.
This is a great way to draw people in and have them do the hard work of spreading the word.
Whatever you do, make sure you stay on-brand and make your organization’s presence known in each and every post.
Here’s what NOT to do:
Here’s what TO do:
Whether you do this on a regular basis or just occasionally doesn’t matter, as long as you make it easy for users to find the link to your website’s homepage.
Interested users should never have to struggle to find your website.
These are just a few of the ways to utilize social media to engage your audience and generate more traffic to your business’s website.
Experiment with them and monitor the results in order to figure out what works best for your company.
You’ll master it eventually and, when you do, your hard work will finally pay off in terms of sales and revenue.
Author
Chris Hickman is the Founder and CEO at Adficient with 15 years of experience in search marketing and conversion optimization. Since 2006, he founded GetBackonGoogle.com, helping businesses and websites suspended in Adwords to Get Back on Google.
