Everyone makes using social media to drive traffic sound so
easy. All you have to do is post a few times on Facebook,
Twitter or LinkedIn, and the traffic will start pouring in.
The reality, like with anything else is that you need to
spend enough time learning how to do it properly.
If you didn’t already know, social media traffic is one of the
largest referrers, when it comes to driving web traffic, at
your disposal.
In fact, according to Shareaholic, social media traffic makes
up 31 percent of overall traffic, with Facebook alone
accounting for 17.41 percent of the traffic.
With high-quality visitors from social media, you can build a
business. With social media traffic continuing to grow, it's
never too late to get started.
To be successful in driving more traffic with social media,
you'll need a strategy.
A good social media strategy will serve your company in
many ways:
• Increased traffic
• Relationship building
• Better customer retention/satisfaction
• Better customer service
The one thing that you have to remember is that
consistency is key when it comes to your social media
strategy. If you only execute your plan for one day, you'll
see no results.
If you just do it for a month, you'll see some results. If you
execute it for a year, you will see a significant increase in
traffic. If you are looking for a magic bullet that will allow you
to get the traffic without doing the work, you’re not going to
find it.
You have to work at it if you want to build long-term
sustainable traffic for your business. If you fully commit to
your strategy, you’ll reap the rewards of your hard work.
Understanding Your Reader’s Minds
When it comes to being successful with your social media
marketing efforts, you have to know which social networks
your target audience is using.
If your blog is targeted towards the elderly, the last place
you want to try to build a following on is Instagram. Even if
you do everything right, you will never get any significant
traffic from your efforts
The foundation of your social media strategy is to first and
foremost to learn who your target audience is and why they
use social media. To accomplish this, you have to utilize
demographics.
Determining Demographics
Your demographics will tell you the who, and include:
• Location
• Gender
• Age
• Income
• Education level
• Ethnicity
• Marital status
• Religion
• Number of children
Determining your demographics will depend on whether you
have a website and traffic already.
If you don't have a site yet, you will need to find a website
that is similar to your business and use it for your analysis.
In determining demographics, there are a few options. You
can use Alexa to help you with figuring out your audience.
All you need to do is enter your site or competitors into the
search bar, and it will provide you with the information you
need.
You can also use Google Adwords Display Planner. With
this tool, you just need to enter a keyword that describes
your niche into the search bar.
When you hit the submit button, you'll get a screen that
displays useful age and gender information at the top.
The final way you can gather demographic information is
with Google Analytics. The data is collected from your site
and reveals key metrics for both age and gender.
This data is the best source of information for you because it
represents your actual audience.
Choose the Most Effective Platform
After you've determined your demographics, you'll want to
pick one or two social media platforms to focus all your
marketing efforts on.
By investing the extra time on just a few channels, you’ll get
better and quicker results, than if you were to try and invest
in all the various social media platforms.
You will need to find a platform where your audience hangs
out. Start narrowing down your choices based on the age of
your audience.
Vine and Tumblr tend to be better options for a younger
demographic, while LinkedIn and Facebook are better for an
older demographic.
While Facebook is starting to lose popularity among the
younger users, 70 percent of adults are still active on the
site.
Create Content that Adds Value
Now that you have a better understanding of your target
audience and have chosen a couple of social media
channels to focus on, it’s time to begin developing content
that delivers value to them.
It is important to remember that the more value you can
bring them the faster your presence will grow online.
The second part of the equation is consistency.
Unlike search engine traffic, that can continue to grow even
if you don't publish new content; you have to remain
consistent on social media to improve your traffic.
To do this, you need to create as much content as possible
that your target audience will love. Your content can include
any of the following, depending on the channels you've
chosen.
• Blog posts
• Pictures
• Infographics
• Videos
• Quotes
• Jokes
• Quick tips
The right kind of content will depend entirely on the
networks you’re focusing on. It is also important to
understand with social media is that to keep your audience
engaged, you can't just share your own content.
When you are first starting out, you want to err on the side
of being non-promotional and share content that others
have created.
Get Followers
Sharing your content without having any followers is a waste
of your time. Without people seeing, reading, and re-sharing
the content you share you will never have the chance to
build relationships and trust, and you will never see any
significant traffic for your efforts.
One of the easiest, and most effective ways to gain
followers, at first, is to follow as many of your target
audience members as possible.
A generous percentage of these people will follow you back.
As you share content, the number of followers will begin to
grow and so will your traffic.
Determining the Optimal Frequency of
Posts
As you begin to share more content, you’ll start to notice
that you might get a few clicks every time you post
something new. You may start to think that if you shared
twice as much, you’d get twice as much traffic.
To some extent, that thinking is correct. However, you have
to be careful, so that you don’t start being seen as a
spammer.
You'll want to test the frequency of your postings to optimize
your strategy for your business. Depending on your
audience, you may need to share more or less. Here is a list
of ideal frequencies to post on your social media platforms.
• Pinterest – five posts a day
• Twitter – three posts a day
• Google+ - three posts a day
• Facebook – two posts a day
Track Your Results
Your social media strategy is almost complete. You just
need to do this one last step. While this is the easiest of all
the steps, if not done, it can make or break your success.
If you don’t track your results, you won’t be able to see what
is working and what isn’t. Knowing this information can help
you improve your strategy to see even better results.
Using a spreadsheet, record all your shares. This allows you
to see which posts are attracting the most clicks and
engagements, and which ones aren’t.
Knowing this information will help you learn how to write
descriptions that will get the most attention.
The easiest way to get these stats is by signing up at Buffer.
The site tracks your clicks, shares, and impressions and
delivers them in an easy to understand format.
Continue to look at these numbers to see if they are slowly
going up if they aren't then you'll have to rethink your
strategy.
To ensure that you are effectively pushing traffic to your site,
you’ll also want to use Google Analytics. Start by looking at
the overall traffic. This will show you how much traffic you
are getting from each network.
If the data presented isn't showing your traffic increases
over time, you'll need to figure out why. Additionally, by
adding the secondary dimension of "referral path," the
information will show you where your traffic is coming from.
Some of the networks will allow you to see precisely what
post sent the traffic to your website. Unfortunately, there are
some, most notably Twitter, that will only provide you with a
jumbled-up referral list that isn’t very useful.
As you continue to implement your strategy and track the
results, you'll want to start studying the specific posts that
gave you the most traffic.
Focus on those posts that you shared that weren't yours.
Start building relationships with these individuals to increase
your chances of getting significant recurring traffic.
Conclusion
This may seem like a ton of work, and it is. But if you want
to get serious about driving traffic to your site, your social
media strategy is crucial.
A solid social media strategy isn’t for the light of heart. It will
take time for you to build your first plan and execute it
successfully, but your efforts will be well worth it when you
start seeing the results of your efforts in increased traffic.