One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to use social media channels to promote your content, increase web traffic and encourage more sales. Understanding the differences between each social channel and another is essential too. For example, Twitter is ideal for short, snappy (and tempting) links, whereas Facebook and LinkedIn are great for longer post links.
When you post a new blog or update on your website, it can take a while to get traction with Google, but when you link to this update via social media posts, you’ll be giving it a faster, more prosperous opportunity to be found by the public. And because those posts will primarily show up in the feeds of followers and people interested in what you’re selling, that traffic is typically very targeted. It won’t just boost your traffic numbers — it will bring in the type of visitors you want to attract.
In fact, the traffic benefits of social media marketing can be dramatic. Today’s blog highlights a few of them:
Search engine crawlers know which pages are consistently earning traffic and which are just floating out there – forgotten and ignored. Although your killer content strategy is the most important factor in your search rankings, driving traffic to your optimized pages will cause them to climb much faster, and it wouldn’t hurt if you also re-share your relevant content once a month in order to ensure it gets seen by more followers.
The interaction that Twitter and Instagram allow you to make with your customer base is part of what makes these social channels effective. By reading your customers’ tweets and status updates, you’ll gain insights into their daily lives and consumer behaviors, and answer questions such as:
What products/services are they buying and why?
What hobbies do they have?
What kinds of posts do they love to share?
What websites do they visit?
These insights have obvious marketing benefits. When you understand your customers, you can write better content and more compelling posts, which leads to more traffic. But the benefits can sometimes go far beyond marketing, helping you identify customer pain points, improve sales conversions and even refine your product strategy.
Consumers see Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as social networks, not marketing machines. Therefore, taking a hard-sell approach and inundating your followers with discount offer codes and new product announcements may not be the right thing to do. It’s not enough to just share advertising content through social channels – you need to actively participate in the community, too.
Got a Twitter account? Then join in group discussions with relevant hashtags. Is your audience leaving comments on your Facebook posts? Answer questions and engage with your readers. Nothing turns people off quicker than using social media as a broadcast channel – use social media as it was intended and actually interact with your fans.
After all, your customers want authentic engagement, so you should stop seeing social as a way to pitch your customers and start seeing it as a way to connect with them. Start to actually help customers by answering their questions, entertaining and informing them with relevant content and even forming bonds over shared interests.
And that comes with serious ROI, bringing in new leads and turning those leads into not only followers but also qualified leads that are likely to attract even more clients to your business.
Being the world’s second biggest search engine, YouTube can help you boost your visibility even more by including videos in your content mix. Videos also show up in search results. So even creating promotional content for your brand and sharing it on social media would do you great – as well.
Need Help Using Social Marketing To Drive More Web Traffic?
VOILA has the expertise to help you build your awesome social channels and craft the right content to build and engage your audience, increase your followers and turn followers into leads. All you need to do is get in touch with us today.