Blog post

7 Tips To Drive More Social Traffic To Your Website in 2017

Date of post

4 May 2017

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Read time

6 mins
10 tips to drive more social traffic blog post

Driving social traffic is more important than ever before. Brands now focus on boosting social traffic and creating viral hits for spreading their word.

It is, therefore, critical to concentrate on driving the correct social visitors to your website through the development of effective social media strategies. Learn how to boost social media traffic in 2017 with these top 7 free social marketing tips, written by the social marketing experts.

  1. Choose the most appropriate social media platform for your business

    Not every social channel may necessarily work for your business. Remember, every social media platform will require a degree of ‘management’ – the trick is not to spread yourself too thin. Focus on establishing a presence on the platforms your target customers may use through creating and sharing great content that provides genuine user value.

    If you’re a business to consumer (B2C) website, social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest offer an opportunity to promote your business organically on a personal level with your visitors. If you’re a business to business (B2B) website, your focus should be across the more professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn, BeyondMeet-UpZerply and Xing. You can use these social platforms to generate new business and show off your fantastic work!

    Choose the righ social media platforms for your business

  2. Use inspiring visuals and imagery across your posts

    You should know by now that images and catchy visuals sell. To help boost social post engagement to drive website traffic, remember to include quality visuals within you text posts. Research has highlighted that Twitter tweets with images attached return 18% more clicks and 35% more re-tweets vs those without images!

    When creating your social post, stay away from adding generic deposit photos that are dull and ordinary. Focus on using custom imagery that is personal to your business – you could even create an infographic! If you’re struggling to create custom visuals, there are hundreds of great image-creating tools – we highly recommend Pic Monkey and Canva.

    create custom images to boost social engagement

  3. Understand when your audience is listening

    Every social media platform has its natural peak and dips of user activity throughout the day. The task is to know when YOUR audience is listening. To help boost engagement and build followers, create a scheduling strategy to ensure your posting is consistent and in line with follower activity. There is no ‘one-method approach’ to find this bite point – we recommend testing multiple post times. You can then analyse the data to find what works best for you and your business.

  4. Focus on creating ‘evergreen’ content

    This is a Marketing Labs secret and a concept you may never have heard before! Today, business are too quick to share the same content across their social media platforms. Not only does this create duplicate content issues that will affect your site’s SEO, but also fails to understand that every social media platform is different. A ‘one-size’ fits all approach could reduce engagement and halt social users visiting your website.

    Creating ‘evergreen’ content is about getting creative with how you display your posts on social media platforms. For example; if you post your latest blog post link on your Facebook page, why not pull out quick content highlights and create an infographic to post on Pinterest? By approaching content creation/strategy in this way, businesses can focus on generating quality content (not quantity) that can be shared in different forms over and over again. In the words of Will Young, make your content evergreen!

    focus on creating long lasting evergreen content to share

  5. Don’t forget to engage with your audience

    Remember, relationships and growth can’t happen in isolation. Social media has been built for users to interact with each other. As part of your social media strategy don’t forget to engage with your visitors, industry influencers and other interesting/relevant groups. For example; if you’re on Instagram and you sell knitting supplies, follow other knitting accounts – give them some love and even leave a comment to show your appreciation.

    Don’t use your social media platforms as a ‘hot-air’ tool to purely shout about your business. Focus on actively engaging and building a community feel to help drive social traffic to your website.

     

    Focus on actively engaging and building a community to help drive social traffic to your website.
    – Mike McManus (Digital Marketing Whizz | Marketing Labs)

  6. Use #’s to create a greater social reach

    Hashtags are the lifeblood of particular social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. They allow the platform to segregate content into navigable lists and group relevant content together. Including relevant #’s within you social posts could help to generate a wider reach of users who may not currently know about your page.

    Before posting, investigate popular hashtags that you could use by manually searching popular #’s within the platform. Alternatively; you could use hashtags research tools such as Follower Wonk and Hashtagify to create deeper insight. However, try not to overthink about the hashtags within your posts. The main aim is to include relevant #’s to build engagement with your audience.

    include relevant hashtags to drive trraffic

  7. Install a social media sharing plugin across your website or blog

    Our final social media tip to help boost traffic takes a different approach. Remember, social content shares don’t always have to be ‘pushed’ through the social channels by you and your team. By installing a social share plugin you hand the power over to your visitors – allowing them to share your content directly to their followers when they visit your website – this could be products or useful information.

    To help boost sharing and engagement, create friendly URL’s for social platforms and set-up Google URL shortener to track activity. You can also set-up Twitter Cards across your blog posts to ensure your content displays in the correct way when shared. Also, if you create YouTube videos, don’t forget to add your website URL link to take advantage of online viewers – remember people who watch your video may be interested in what you have to offer on your site!

    install a share plugin to help boost reach

    There you have it, 7 free social media marketing tips to help you boost your social website traffic in 2017. Focus on creating simple social media strategies that you and your team can stick to – don’t spread your efforts too thin. Keep on trend and post relevant and useful information that adds value to your social visitors. Remember, don’t be dull, add custom imagery to help you stand out. Finally, engage with your audience, relationships can’t happen in isolation.

    Contact our expert digital team at Marketing Labs to see how we can help grow your social engagement.

Post author

Matt is a leading figure in search engine optimisation, with over twenty years of experience in eCommerce and digital marketing. After years of running his own eCommerce businesses and then consulting for digital marketing agencies, in 2016, he decided to set up Marketing Labs.

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