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 Cooper
points 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.
