By Jessica Davis
Enhancing social media traffic is much like planning a layout. You need to know how to drive visits to and through your real estate. If you consider each referral route to your website, social most likely contributes to a good amount of traffic.
Ensuring visits via social media engagement can be challenging, especially for small businesses on a budget who are also exploring paid advertisement avenues.
While paid plans can boost website traffic, how do you make people visit your social media profiles?
Building social media traffic and prompting conversions
Engaging content is key to building social media traffic. Another important focus is initiating and nurturing relationships. Being present and attentive to consumers, superfans and prospects can accelerate the purchase cycle.
Every social network is different, but there are certain ground rules you should follow across social media. To boost your social media page views and conversions, follow these three steps.
Consider audience intent
Targeted marketing works because you give people what they want. This principle applies just the same to social media marketing.
When you share links on social networks, the likelihood of someone clicking on them and visiting your profile or website, and then following you or making a purchase, all depend on one critical factor – What are they expecting at the end of that click?
Give them precisely that and you’ll see your conversions rise. Understand what questions your audience is asking.
Tools to help identify audience intent
- Quora: Search for questions in your niche, and you’ll find what your audience is looking for
Google Analytics: Sometimes, you see complete search phrases in your organic keywords. Use them to build your content strategy. - FAQ: Use this tool to find questions mentioning your keywords of interest
Use inspired visuals & trust-building content
First impressions are critical. What is the first impression that your social media page creates? Content can have personality, and building one is an essential part of garnering audience attention.
Your content should also create trust, because it is necessary to build long-term and lucrative relationships with brand loyalists, repeat consumers and potential partners.
Industry related content created by experts, case-studies, research and reliable news are a few types of content that can help you build trust with your audience.
You have already been exposed to stats that prove the effectiveness of visual content and live video, but what you didn’t know is that only 14% marketers used livestreaming in 2016. By starting today, you could get ahead of the trend.
Tools to help create & curate compelling content
- Animoto: To make videos
- DrumUp: To curate industry content & RSS feeds
- Canva: For posts and infographics
Optimize for search and shareability
A good amount of time spent on social media is on mobile devices. You have to ensure that your share buttons are placed correctly, so your readers don’t have to scroll a lot to reach that point. You blog and images should also be responsive, so they can fit the screen of any device and make navigation easy.
If your web pages/blog posts aren’t optimized for search, they’re not going to earn you much traffic or conversions.
You can use social media for link-building, by building the right relationships. It begins with consistently sharing content created by blog owners and influential experts, so they take notice of you. You can use Twitter lists to bookmark important people so you can interact with their content on a regular basis.
Tools to optimize for search and searchability
- SumoMe: For social sharing buttons
- Twitter lists: To manage prospect relationships
Additionally, it’s important that you have the right sharing schedule. Spamming your fans isn’t nice or appreciated. It’s also important to keep an eye on engagement metrics, you know your audience is reading posts.
Wrap
Social media traffic can give your conversions the boost that you need. It’s only a matter of getting consumer intent, content and distribution right.
Jessica Davis is a Content Strategy expert at Godot Media, a leading content services company. She works with other writers to create engaging and effective web content for businesses and individuals. She is also interested in technology, social media and fashion. @godotmedia.
