There are plenty of reasons to use social media for your business. It helps you connect with your audience, gain followers, increase brand awareness, increase sales, and more. Perhaps one of the biggest reasons to use social media is to send people back to your website. The more people see your website, the more potential you have to increase sales and turn fans into customers.
Of course, convincing people to go to your website isn’t as simple as posting a link to your page and hoping people will follow it. Increasing web traffic takes a multifaceted approach. You probably know about techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO) and creating great content, there are specific things that you can do using your social media accounts to give a boost to your web traffic.
Beef Up Your Bio
The simplest, quickest way to make sure people will visit your website is to make sure your social media profiles have as much information as possible.
You’ll want to make sure that your bio or profile for your various social media accounts contain up-to-date links to your website. Use the bio or description sections to create captivating descriptions telling your audience what you’re about- and what makes you unique. Tell people who you are and where to find you.
Recycle Content
Believe it or not, recycling your content can actually help boost web traffic. The more you share your content, the more people will see it. Use caution to not repost your content too frequently or you’ll run the risk of spamming your audience’s newsfeeds and possibly lose followers. To avoid this, carefully work recycled material into your content strategy. You can try to find significant dates or events to make older material more relevant. This will remind your audience that you produce great, relevant content and direct them back to your blog or website.
Use Hashtags
Hashtags are actually incredibly important to social media marketing. Most social platforms use them to catalog related content, but they’re most effective on Instagram. People are increasingly using hashtags on social media to find content they like and relate to. Instagram now allows users to follow specific hashtags. When they do this, posts that contain that particular hashtag will show up on the user’s feed – even from accounts they don’t typically follow.
Many individual users and large curated accounts will use hashtags to discover new accounts to follow and possibly even repost. When you use relevant hashtags on your posts, your posts show up in the feeds of your ideal customers. Hashtags allow you to be discovered by your ideal audience.
Promotions and Ad Campaigns
By running ad campaigns or promotions on social media, you’re explicitly giving your audience a reason to go to your website. Paid campaigns allow you to target people who are in your target demographic but may not be a customer or client already. Running promotions will provide your customers with direct links to your website and entice them to visit your site.
Include Images
Content that includes a visual element get more shares and interaction than text-only content. Photos, gifs, videos, and graphics can all count as a visual elements. Including them will make your post more compelling to your audience. Making sure that your content contains compelling images will increase your posts’ interaction.
You can get creative with this. Are you making an announcement? Instead of posting a text-only post, consider making the announcement in video format. Making an informative blog post? Consider adding pictures and graphs or charts to help explain your points. One thing to remember when creating video content on your social media platforms, make sure that you’re telling people to visit your website for more information at the end of the video. When you engage more senses, your audience will be more engaged and invested and more likely to remember it.
Know Your Audience
Knowing who you’re pitching to will help you create content that connects with your audience better. Try to picture your ideal customer and create content and social media posts that would connect with your audience. While this might seem like narrowing your focus would decrease the amount of people you’ll reach, it actually will make sure that the audience you do reach is one that will engage with your brand. By targeting a specific audience, you’ll move from creating content that feels generic to content that feels personal. This will result in your audience feeling like you know them.
Collaborate With Related Accounts
A great way to get your name in front of people and tap into new audiences is to collaborate with other brands. Find other brands or accounts that are related to your niche but are not in direct competition to you and see if you can guest post on their accounts or website. This will expose your brand and website to new audiences and hopefully increase your own followers and fans. Collaborating with related brands will also help establish you as an authority figure in your field. Guest posting on other accounts shows your audience that you can be trusted and that your peers respect your opinion and content.
Of course you can also host guests on your blog or account. Consider asking respected brands in your field to guest post on your own website. There are many ways that you can collaborate with other related brands. The important thing is that you make sure you each promote the collaboration equally in order to boost your reach. The goal is to reach out to your collaborator’s audience and attract new traffic to your website – and hopefully gain you new customers as well.
These are just a few of the things you can do to leverage your social media accounts to drive traffic back to your website. Creating compelling content is vitally important to your success – but it won’t do you much good if people don’t know where to find it. When you use social media, you want to make sure that you’re frequently using your content to direct people to your website.
Followers and fans who like and interact with posts on social media are great. But the real goal is to turn followers into customers. Make sure that your social media habits are consistently pointing your audience to your website.
