Social Media to Site Traffic: 5 Tips from the Experts

Social media is a popular way to engage with customers and drive web page traffic, but these information outlets are busy at best and completely overwhelming at worst. You need to target your information to the right audience, link smartly, and get your audience engaged to convert your social followers into web traffic. Want to learn how? Check out these expert tips.

Be Careful Where You're Sending People

Without thinking about it, many people automatically link their social media sites to their website's home page. If your home page, like many others, is cluttered and overwhelming, this strategy will set you up for failure. David Risley of Blog Marketing Academy suggests driving traffic to a more valuable page that will immediately engage visitors.

Link from Twitter to an "About" page to immediately offer an in-depth introduction that counters the necessary brevity of a tweet. Link to a squeeze page that collects contact information for a mailing list or a coupon page that immediately offers something of value. 

Engage Your Followers Personally

Give your followers a personal incentive to visit your web page. Ask for their advice on blog topics, start a debate, or take a quick poll. Question posts get 100 percent more comments. Risley suggests featuring the most interesting responses directly on your blog and letting your followers know they were featured. It's hard to resist checking out a post that's about you. Social media writer Belle Beth Cooperpoints out that keeping your current customers engaged may be more important than finding new ones.

Use your social media presence to interact with followers. If you use your profiles exclusively for posting links to your website or blog, your customers will disengage quickly and forget all about you. Strike up conversations, answer questions, and otherwise act like a living, breathing person and not a link generator.

Make it Easy for Fans to Share

People are much more likely to follow a link posted by their best friend than one shared by the company who wrote it. Make it easy for your fans to share products, posts, and more. Include social media buttons for the sites your fans use most. If you post recipes, beauty tips, and home decorating inspiration, make sure you include photos worthy of Pinterest and a "Pin it" button. Samuel Pustea of Internet Dreams emphasizes the importance of optimizing every image for pinning.

Customize your social media links so the post is already populated with some text. You can set these links to produce a pre-written tweet or include a keyword optimized description beneath a pin. The user can change these, but the default information makes it much less likely that they'll share the link with no details at all. Link generators like Click to Tweet allow you to add this level of customization quickly and easily.

Make Your Posts Visually Engaging

Social media pages are made for rapid scrolling. If all you post is text, your viewers may miss you entirely. If your post is wordy, they're even more likely to skip past. Posts that include photos are better attention grabbers. Facebook photos get 53 percent more likes and 104 percent more comments, according to a HupSpot study.

Writer, blogger, and community manager Luke Chitwood points out the need to make sure your photos include a link back to your site. Double check this link to ensure that it goes to a relevant post and not just the original image. If your photo gets the viewer's interest but doesn't take him anywhere, you've lost a prime opportunity to generate website traffic. Pictures that engage interest and spark curiosity will leave your viewer hungry to learn more.

Choose Your Domain Hosting Service Carefully

Even if your social media marketing efforts yield a ton of traffic, it won't mean anything if your site is always down. Subsequently, you'll want to do some research before you choose a domain host. For example, does your host really have the uptime it claims to provide? How about the "unlimited resources" and "knowledgeable support" that these services almost universally offer? Do your due diligence, and check out comprehensive overviews like this Hostgator Hosting review on Sitegeek before you commit to any given hosting service. Your investment of time and effort will be well worth the effort.    

Social media profiles offer a powerful way to generate website traffic when they're well managed. Unfortunately, many companies never see measurable returns on this strategy because they don't know how to make social media work for them. Start with these expert suggestions to radically change the way social media impacts your web page traffic.

Source: http://socialmediatoday.com/philcohen4/2434126/social-media-site-traffic-5-tips-experts

Eating Alone? Chipotle Cups Now Come With Original Writings From Literary Giants

Apparently Jonathan Safran Foer is just like us. He eats at Chipotle and he curses the heavens when he neglects to bring something to entertain him while he crams rice, beans and guacamole (he's a vegetarian) into his piehole.

But since he's a famous author, he was able to e-mail the chain's CEO, Steve Ells, and pitch him a neat idea: "I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn't have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text," Foer recalled to Vanity Fair as a summary of his e-mail.

This is all to say that, starting today, original long-form text by Foer—along with fellow scribes Judd Apatow, Sheri Fink, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Hader, Michael Lewis, Toni Morrison, Steve Pinker, George Saunders and Sarah Silverman—will festoon Chipotle's cups and bags. Chipotle deemed the initiative "Cultivating Thought." Foer selected the writers, and any edits were made by him.

Check out two of the writeups below and see them all here.

Via Vanity Fair.

The Two-Minute Minute 
By Michael Lewis 

I spend too much time trying to spend less time. Before trips to the grocery store, I’ll waste minutes debating whether it is more efficient to make a list, or simply race up and down the aisles grabbing things. I spend what feels like decades in airport security lines trying to figure out how to get through most quickly: should I put the plastic bin containing my belt and shoes through the bomb detector before my carry-on bag, or after? And why sit patiently waiting for the light to turn green when I might email on my phone? I’ve become more worried about using time efficiently than using it well. But in saner moments I’m able to approach the fourth dimension not as a thing to be ruthlessly managed, but whose basic nature might be altered to enrich my experience of life. I even have tricks for slowing time—or at least my perception of it. At night I sometimes write down things that happened that day.

For example: This morning Walker (my five year old son) asks me if I had a pet when I was a kid. “Yes,” I say, “I had a Siamese cat that I loved named Ding How, but he got run over by a car.” Walker: “It’s lucky that it got killed by a car.” Me: “Why?” Walker: “Because then you could get a new cat that isn’t named Ding How.”

Recording the quotidian details of my day seems to add hours a day to my life: I’m not sure why. Another trick is to focus on some ordinary thing—the faintly geological strata of the insides of a burrito, for instance—and try to describe what I see. Another: pick a task I’d normally do quickly and thoughtlessly–writing words for the side of a cup, say–and do it as slowly as possible. Forcing my life into slow-motion, I notice a lot that I miss at game speed. The one thing I don’t notice is the passage of time.

Two-Minute Seduction
By Toni Morrison

I took my heart out and gave it to a writer made heartless by fame, someone who needed it to pump blood into veins desiccated by the suck and roar of crowds slobbering or poisoning or licking up the red froth they mistake for happiness because happiness looks just like a heart painted on a valentine cup or tattooed on an arm that has never held a victim or comforted a hurt friend. I took it out and the space it left in my chest was sutured tight like the skin of a drum.

As my own pulse failed, I fell along with a soft shower of rain typical in this place.

Lying there, collapsed under trees bordering the mansion of the famous one I saw a butterfly broken by the slam of a single raindrop on its wings fold and flutter as it hit a pool of water still fighting for the lift that is its nature. I closed my eyes expecting to dissolve into stars or lava or a brutal sequoia when the famous writer appeared and leaned down over me. Lifting my head he put his lips on mine and breathed into my mouth one word and then another, and another, words upon words then numbers, then notes. I swallowed it all while my mind filled with language, measure, music, knowledge.

These gifts from the famous writer were so seductive, so all encompassing they seemed to make a heart irrelevant.

Source: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/eating-alone-chipotle-cups-now-come-original-writings-literary-giants-157686

Coca-Cola Builds Adorable Mini Kiosks to Sell Mini Cokes

"It's the little things in life that makes us happy." That's the message in this print and outdoor Coca-Cola campaign from Ogilvy Berlin, and it's true in advertising generally. Unusually little things tend to get big props—whether you're talking doll houses, mini Abe Lincolns or tiny billboards.

Ogilvy placed these mini kiosks in five major German cities. They sold mini cans of Coke, which was the whole point, but also various other miniature products. They even had a pint-size vending machine. The kiosks sold an average of 380 mini cans per day, which Ogilvy says is 278 percent more than a typical Coke vending machine.

Via The Denver Egotist.

Source: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/coca-cola-builds-adorable-mini-kiosks-sell-mini-cokes-157669