How to Generate Traffic With Social Media Marketing

26 October 2020
26 October 2020
How to Generate Traffic With Social Media Marketing

Customisation and personal interaction are key when considering your website marketing plan and how to generate more website traffic. Audiences want to receive media tailored to their personal narrative, and they tend to reject generic, one-size-fits-all content.

Social media offers a window into the unique data of your followers—where they work, their favourite foods, or their prefered online retailers—and is a tool for driving Google traffic. Your social media tactics should generate a personalised experience for followers and the specific target audiences of your brand.

Below are four tips to consider when building a social media marketing strategy to stimulate greater website engagement:

Optimise your business profile 

Don’t cut and paste an image for reuse across all your social profiles. Keep in mind that each platform has its image requirements and that your potential customers are more likely to discover your brand via social media profiles than by landing directly on your website. The visual identity of your brand can catch viewers attention and will often be the only thing they remember—so don’t have a stretched icon or blurry header.

On your business’ Facebook Page, your cover photo needs to be 820 x 312 pixels. Anything less will be stretched. For Twitter, your header photo needs to be 1,500 x 500 pixels and is quite a bit larger than your profile photo. For this reason, your social media icons should be saved at the highest possible resolution and should be something eye-catching.

Headers and profile photos take up valuable space on your social media and should be frequently customised to showcase your brand aesthetic and its specialised offerings. Besides curating professional imagery, make sure your website marketing strategy includes updating your profile links regularly to reflect new content or brand initiatives.

Creating an account on GoogleMyBusinessis vital, ensuring your business profile is always up-to-date and engaging for your audience. A post scheduler for GMB can streamline the process of managing posts, making it easier for you to maintain a consistent and professional online presence.

Social platforms like Instagram will only give users a single profile link opportunity. Brands can maximise their profile’s ability to generate new website traffic by using a bio-link tool like Linktree or adding an Instagram feed to their website. One link takes your audience to a separate menu with multiple pieces of content and a traceable funnel for new actions.

Personal interactions with your followers 

Don’t ignore your notifications, status updates, or comments on Instagram and other social media platforms! Engaging with Instagram followers by responding to comments and acknowledging their interactions fosters a stronger community and builds lasting connections. Remember, your social feed is for your followers, not for you.

Too often tweets, posts, comments, or status updates from followers will be left unanswered or unengaged. When this happens, you miss the opportunity to qualify new sales leads, improve search results, and generate website traffic.

Automated responses from bots won’t do. From a marketing standpoint, the ‘social’ component of social media is the direct, personalised engagement you get with your target audience. You can (and should) answer questions and obtain feedback in real-time with as much diligence and nuance as possible.

Make sure you’re actively engaging followers that mention your brand on social media. These types of personal interactions can drive google traffic from your profiles directly to your website. This social media tactic can provide the opportunity to learn more about what users are seeking and can effectively direct them to more customised products or services.

Another tactic is to contribute to online forums by offering knowledge and links to content that is relevant to a particular niche. Websites like Quora and Reddit, all have communities ranging from digital marketing to kittens. The people in these forums are often serious about their topic and want to learn more and talk with other experts. If you can offer authentic viewpoints, you can position your content and drive traffic back to your website.

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Create a company blog 

Instead of regularly echoing other people’s content on social media, create a company blog and self-publish content that caters to your audience and the problems they face. You can then distribute these shareable materials across your social media platforms for your followers. All social media calls-to-action should be clear and directly focused on moving the reader towards your website or blog. With numerous useful social media management tools, you can strategically attract a larger and more targeted audience across various social media platforms

This tactic for sharing knowledge with your audience provides a new conduit for feedback and personalised interaction. The insights you gather from sharing your blog content may surprise you.

Make content easy to find & share 

Make your content helpful –even if it’s personalised for a small, niche audience. It’s also important that search terminologies and themes are easily interchangeable with your other projects. Try experimenting with different website marketing formats for your content: instructional tutorials, simple lists, product reviews, videos, interviews, and spotlights on follower feedback. Each platform you publish on offers something unique for generating new traffic sources while also developing your team’s capability for storytelling. TikTok has become a great space for this kind of content.

Once followers have landed on your social profiles, blog or website, they should be empowered and encouraged to share your content with the click of a button. Emphasise this behaviour by incorporating social tools into your website, like Cresta’s Social Share Counter or AddThis, that make the process easy and traceable. Click to Tweet allows visitors to quickly retweet your updates with their Twitter followers (while linking back to your content). This option doesn’t display the share count but does make it easy for visitors to piggyback off of your insights and blast out information quickly.

Creating and implementing a social media marketing plan takes time, but remember: the content itself doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s more important that your social media and website strategies offer simple, personalised value to your audience than it is to overload them with new information.

Featured image: Smartphone via unsplash

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