Imagine a traffic generator that sends you targeted traffic, and all you have to do is be sociable, engaging, and share appealing and interesting information, whether written, spoken, or visual.

Social media is one such generator. And it’s inexpensive, too. But, before you invest time posting without purpose, get to know the best practices and how to use it effectively to get targeted website traffic from social media.

To make it work to your benefit, it’s important to separate messing around vs. using it in a strategic way to get your desired result. That said, let’s take a look at some of those strategies and best practices.

Determine Who You Want To Visit Your Website

If you’ve heard it once, I’ll hazard a guess that you’ve heard it 1000 times; know your audience. It’s imperative that you get down pat who your audience is before you even begin trying to attract them to your networks, let alone send them to your website. Otherwise, you’ll waste your time. People who aren’t in your niche don’t want what you’re selling.

Here’re a few tips on how to determine the type of people you want to visit your website.

Observational Research – aka, snoop, not in a creepy way, of course. Follow people who you think are in your niche and observe what they share, like, read, do in their free time, what they tell their connections on social media. Really get to know who they are. In addition, you’ll learn what their desires are and from this know the types of products that will solve their issues.

Get To Know Them – Now get to know them in a more personal way by engaging on social media. Social media is first and foremost a social medium – a way to connect and communicate.

Who They Know – Likely the people they follow have shared interests, are either seeking the same information (think groups) to solve their problems, or they’re influencers in your niche.

Gathering such information does three things: First, you know for sure who is your target audience and when they visit your website, the content provided is specific to them. Two,
you know where to promote your products and services beyond your website and three, when you engage with influencers, you have an opportunity to collaborate with them to share your information.

Be Interesting (Hint: It’s not about you)

Our attention is pulled every which way, so in order to be noticed, share interesting attention-grabbing information. And while the material is coming from you and some may be about you, it’s actually not about you.

Sounds convoluted? It’s not. What is meant is that what you share must resonate with your audience. Here’re some tips on how to do that.

Post Images Gifs and Video – We are more likely to stop the scroll and look at interesting graphics and share it. They help make a serious subject less painful, as well as explain complicated topics in fewer words. While this is nice and dandy, according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research.

“Nothing in the world of marketing can convey a message as dynamically as the combination of motion, sound and colorful graphic animation. While a picture is said to be worth 1,000 words, a one minute video is said to be valued at 1.8 million words.”

Be Humorous – If you can make a point with humour, you’ll get attention and when that attention converts into clicks, well, isn’t that a bonus. That’s why knowing your audience is the number one thing you need to nail down for your business to be successful. However, it doesn’t always have to be relative to work.

Ask Questions – If you’re not sure what to say to get interaction, asking is usually a fantastic conversation starter, especially if it’s on an image or is complimented by an image. Avoid ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses though. Boring, won’t you say? Include multiple choices. People will be more inclined to participate and go into detail.

Share personal Activities – Another way to be interesting is to share activities that you participate in. And I don’t mean walking the dog, though this may be cute, neither do I mean every personal activity in your life. However, sharing something that you encounter, experience, etc., that makes for a good tee-hee, will brighten someone’s day and people will be drawn to your personality and engage more.

Show Results – If you’re promoting something that has a positive end result, post about it. Either images of yourself if it’s pertinent to your niche, i.e., weight loss, or images of testimonials about your product/service your audience have used.

Be Yourself – No one’s perfect and there’s only ‘unique’ you. Share challenges you’ve experienced so people know you’ve been there, done that and overcame them and that’s why you’re you have the solutions to their challenges. So, always be yourself. If you don’t, it’ll eventually show.

The more you can turn all these things around to be about your audience, the better engagement you’ll get. When your audience feels listened to and understood, they’re much more likely to click through and go to your website, sign up for your email lists, buy your products and services and become part of your inner circle.

Active Participation

To state the obvious, social media is social. Therefore, while automation is awesome, it’s not everything. Go through your social accounts (maybe once per day) and look for questions that need to be answered. People will notice, appreciate your expertise, and grow to trust you.

Commit to a Schedule – If you have no plan, you’ll waste time. After all, there’s no better time sucker than social media. So, to be productive, set up a schedule to post and stick to it.

Avoid Spamming – Each social network has its own unspoken rules when it comes to how often you share a post. The trick is to share it in a different way. It can be the same link but describe it differently in your blurb.

Optimize Your Content – Everything that you publish, no matter where, should be optimized. That means, use the right words to get the attention of your audience (keywords), and a call to action (CTA). Further, each network has its own way to showcase content, ensure that you post the correct image size for optimal engagement.

Engage With Your Audience – Post regularly and engage with others on their pages. Whether it to answer comments or offer recommendations. If you post something and it gets even one comment, be sure to comment back.

Check Your Metrics – Nothing is complete until the data is checked. You’ll never know what’s working if you don’t check the numbers. It’s important to know where all the clicks come from that go to your website. From these, you’ll know if your social media effort is working.

Take Advantage Of Cross Promotions

You have a lot of ability to cross promote your blog and your social media so that traffic runs both ways. The benefit is that those who already love your offerings and are fans will, once they follow you on social media, share your information with their friends and followers. So…

Help Your Audience Promote You – Technology automates many things, and you can help your audience automate how they share throughout all your blog posts, articles, and other content. For example, you can add the ability to Tweet out various quotes from your content. https://wordpress.org/plugins/quote-tweet/

Create Groups – On LinkedIn and Facebook, you can create a group that you are in charge of. This is a great way to build a loyal, social-media audience that takes action on your content.

Collect Email Addresses — On Facebook, you can now create a way for your audience to sign up for your email list right from there. Then, send them messages in email that send them back to your website.

Create A Email Signature – When you send out emails, include your social media links. This is a great opportunity to let your audience know about your social networks and other things you’re doing at the end of your message in the signature line.

Take advantage of cross promoting on multiple channels. It might seem redundant but doing so will help with visibility and expand your brand and reach without extra work.

Get People with Clout on Your Side

People who have good connections will make more money and get more jobs than those who don’t. This is true whether you’re online or not. You’ve heard the phrase, ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.’ Well, perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but it is true to some degree. If you know more people, you’ll be more likely to get hired and get paid more money, too. The cool thing is you can leverage them to expand your reach on social media.

Interview People In Your Niche – Do a video or podcast of an interview and share it on social media with a blurb. Open up Q & A in your Facebook group with the video as the start of the conversation to garner people’s attention.

Tag Experts – If there’s an expert you like, write about them in articles, blog posts, and even social media posts. Tag them. You may bring some of their audience to your page by doing this.

By bringing your social network to the attention of an influencer (or influencers), you may get the attention of their audience (who, of course, should be the same type of audience). This is a productive way to give your social media networks a boost, which will help bring traffic to your website as long as you’re linking to it with new posts.

Summary

When it comes to using social media to generate website traffic there is a cycle to help you get more traffic. Follow these steps:

Your website is the center of your marketing. It’s your business, it’s your storefront, and is where you want to get traffic to. Hence, make it a priority to create relevant content that speaks to your audience.

• Share Content to Social Media – When you post something on your blog, someone else’s blog, or have any type of news about your business – share it to social media. Optimize the share for each network and share as many times as is common with that network, using a different blurb each time
• Share to Your Email List – Likewise, share the link to the post in your emails. People who’ve signed up obviously have an interest in the content.
• Engage with Comments – When you share things of interest on social media, people will comment, ensure that you comment back. Let your audience know you’re available to interact with them. This builds trust, and they’re more likely to click through to your site.
• Repeat – Don’t spam people, but you could repeat posting more than once, change it up and ensure it aligns with your goals. After all, not everyone will see your Tweet at 10 am. You may need to send it at 10, 2, and 6 pm for maximum exposure.

When you do this for every piece of content that you create, you’ll get traffic to your website. So, create a plan of action for generating traffic to your website, be consistent and you will be successful.

© Cherry-Ann Carew

Cherry-Ann Carew is an Online Business Coach, who supports emerging business owners simplify their start-up journey and helps existing businesses scale, so that they can earn uncapped income and live life on their terms.