There are many ways to advertise a website in the digital age, from email marketing to PPC ads. One of the most powerful methods to increase organic traffic with little investment is social media.
Did you know that over 91% of US businesses use social media as a marketing tool? Its accessibility means companies of all sizes, large and small, can utilize its powerful reach. If you’re looking to increase your website’s traffic through social media, keep reading this guide to learn more.
Or, if you’d like to take social media marketing one step further and create your own networking website, check out Idea Maker’s guide to developing a website like Facebook .
What is Social Media?
In simple terms, social media are digital platforms built to enable the creation and sharing of information and ideas. This includes video, image, audio, and written content, all of which are expressed through virtual channels.
Technically, social media platforms are diverse software applications built using intelligent technology. For example, at Idea Maker, we use the highly regarded React Native framework to provide clients with cross-platform social media applications online and across mobile devices.
The most popular online social networking sites are based on internet technologies, such as PHP, Javascript, and HTML5. As a result of their strong technological grounding, high functionality, and refined user interfaces, social media platforms are an excellent place to generate traffic for your website.
Social Media Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
Though social media exists within the scope of digital marketing, it contains many versatile tools and opportunities deserving of its own category. So, what are the other forms of digital marketing, and how do they compare with social media?
PPC Paid Ads
Paid Per Click (PPC) ads are advertisements placed across websites and social media, wherein users pay a fee – or ‘bid’ – when a web user clicks on the attached link. Many prominent social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have an ad management portal, allowing businesses to post PPC ads.
Businesses pay for their promotion to be pushed across the social media platform to users with specific interests. However, PPC ads are not guaranteed to produce adequate results on the first try. As a result, PPC ads may require several iterations, resulting in costly and time-consuming ad campaigns.SEO Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing is the process of refining your website’s content to appear higher on search results pages. There are many methods that are employed to increase website traffic through SEO. This includes keyword research, sourcing quality backlinks, and site speed optimization.
SEO marketing requires a robust long-term strategy and rarely provides immediate, short-term results. Consequently, although SEO can be accomplished freely, it’s always better to hire an expert SEO marketing agency. Even so, social media plays a large part in SEO strategies, as it aids the creation of quality backlinks and can increase keyword search volume.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a brilliant way to generate new leads when executed correctly. However, precise planning and enterprise-level automation software are required to produce effective results. After all, most mail clients have spam detection software, so if your content isn’t positioned perfectly, it will likely end up in the trash.
Though both email marketing and social media can be used to put content in front of users, whether they like it or not, social media offers greater targeting options. This means you can define your intended audience and advertise to individuals accordingly, based on your prior interactions. As a result, users who see your content are already interested and far more likely to engage.
Social Media
Though the previously mentioned methods have clear benefits, social media is undoubtedly the superior choice when generating organic web traffic. Social media platforms allow users to create content to share with followers freely. There is ample opportunity to engage users in following web links within this content.
Generating leads through social media posts is known as content marketing. With a little understanding of social media promotional techniques, you can develop a strong content marketing strategy that increases web traffic.
5 Social Media Post Techniques to Increase Website Traffic
You can follow many techniques to develop a robust, engaged social media following that generates leads to your website. Here are several ways of increasing website traffic using social media.
Link in Bio
Studies estimate that up to 90% of Instagram users enjoy the platform passively. This means that if you don’t guide users to where you want them to be, they will quickly disengage with your content. As a result, whether a user is interested in your business or not, if there’s no accessible link on your profile, they are unlikely to go out of their way to learn more.
In other words, you must make it easy for potential customers to find your site. Including a link in your social media bio gives users a direct route to your website without hassle. Therefore, including your website’s link in your bio is essential for generating organic traffic.
Ask Questions
The key to user engagement is asking questions through your social media content. When a creator poses a question to their followers, it creates a sense of community and connection, inspiring users to interact. You can direct followers to the link in your bio through interaction, thus taking them to your website.
Ask your followers a question while also asking their opinion, then direct them to your site. For example, instead of saying ‘Check out this article on increasing website traffic.’ Inquire, ‘How do you use social media to increase web traffic? Check out some top tips on our website.’
Depending on what social media platform you’re using, you’ll want to direct them to your bio link or paste a link in the post’s caption.
Call To Action
A call to action (CTA) is a marketing method used to encourage followers into an immediate response. CTA’s can be as simple as asking users to like a Facebook post or click a link. An effectively communicated call to action has a high chance of successfully converting passive users to active.
If a user is interested in your content, a call to action gives them a clear direction of what to do next. For example, ‘If you’re interested in our new product, click the link in our bio to purchase.’ This simple CTA tells users how to go about purchasing a product and leads them to a web page.
There’s no use posting about a new product or blog post without telling your followers how to access them. A CTA is an easy but essential step in increasing website traffic through social media.
Influencer Marketing
Advertising using a celebrities image is not exclusive to social media marketing, but influencer marketing is incredibly effective online. The practice is rapidly growing, with 93% of marketing agencies opting to employ influencer marketing.
This marketing method works by cross-pollinating influencer audiences with your own, encouraging their fans to explore your business. Influencer marketing can be as simple as asking them to post a link to your website or as complex as having them produce videos about your content.
Offer Discounts
Did you know that 80% of consumers will try a new product if offered a discount? Offering discounts is an excellent way to increase sales and website visitors through social media-specific deals.
Providing your Facebook followers with an exclusive coupon code like ‘FACEBOOK15%’ gives them a reason to explore your website, thus driving traffic. What’s more, it further creates a sense of value and community between you and your followers, inspiring repeat customers.
Combining the above five social media marketing techniques will help you create an effective online promotion that generates website traffic.
5 Social Media Post Ideas
Now you understand how to market your social media posts to generate organic traffic. However, before running a promotional campaign, you first need to create some high-quality content to share.
Keep in mind that social media users respond better to graphic content, so your posts should contain a visual element. Here are five social media post ideas.
Factual Content
Did you know that 38% of people strongly engage with factual information? This means that posting content relaying factual information has a high chance of being noticed by users. You can ask a question within this content and use a call to action.
For example, ‘Did you know that 86% of web developers work remotely? Read this article to learn more.’ As you can see, factual information lends itself well to questions, making it an excellent post idea for increasing engagement and generating website traffic.
Inspirational Messages
Inspirational quotes can elicit an emotional response from users, whether it’s hope, sadness, or even anger. If your message resonates with a user, they are more likely to engage with your post. While you hold their attention, you can work towards guiding them to your website.
For example, ‘Be brave to stand for what you believe in even if you stand alone. – Roy T. Bennett. Feel inspired? Learn more on our website.’
Useful Information
Providing your social media followers with valuable insights and useful information, such as tutorials, is an excellent way to encourage engagement. By offering useful information, you provide your audience with something they need. Tutorial posts allow you to filter users to your site by offering them more information.
For example, if you were to post a video explaining how to hire a software developer, you may caption it: ‘Want to know how to hire an expert software developer? Learn more on our blog.’ It sounds simple, but adding a similar caption to your video will effectively drive traffic to your site.
Competitions
Running a social media competition is a fruitful way to gain followers and direct website traffic. When running a competition, you set the parameters for entry.
This means you can tell your followers that they must first head to your site and interact in some measurable way to enter your giveaway. For example, you could ask them to sign up for your website’s mailing list.
Competitions are an effective method of traffic generation. You must remember, however, that each social media platform has different rules surrounding competitions and giveaways. Ensure that you check your chosen platform’s guidelines before running a competition.
Repurpose Content
An excellent way to quickly create social media posts is to repurpose blog content. You can do this by simply posting a link to your articles, along with a caption that follows the previously discussed marketing techniques.
For example, ‘Want to learn about WordPress theme development? Check out our extensive guide.’ This allows you to drive direct traffic to your site while not having to create new content.
What Social Media Is Best for Website Traffic?
You now know how to construct compelling social media posts and create high-quality content perfect for lead generation. However, each social media platform is suited to different forms of content, and not all are as successful in driving traffic as others.
Facebook has the benefit of being the most diverse social media network available. It allows users to post long and short-form content, as well as videos and images. This makes it an excellent platform to attempt many of the techniques listed above.
However, Facebook is primarily used to reshare long-form content, such as articles, between users. This means to generate leads through Facebook effectively, you should repurpose content linking to your website’s blog posts.
Unlike the other social media platforms featured in this list, Instagram does not allow users to share links on posts. Users must direct their followers to their bio link. This comes with the problem of inspiring interaction among followers.
Instagram is best suited to short-form visual content with little text outside the caption. As a result, including your website’s link in your bio, asking questions, and directing your followers through CTA’s are especially important on Instagram. However, when you reach a particular following, Instagram does allow you to include web links on Instagram Story posts.
Twitter is the ultimate conversational platform. Its functionality is geared towards short bursts of information and long discussion threads. As a result, Twitter is an excellent place to share quotes and short pieces of factual information while linking directly to your website.
However, with 500 million tweets being posted every day, there’s a significant risk of flying under the radar. Short-form content is easily missed, so you must ensure you use hashtags, ask questions, and include visual content. At the very least, the link you share must have thumbnails.
Social media marketers often forget LinkedIn, but with similar functionality to Facebook and an audience of business professionals, it’s a powerful tool for generating more traffic. Like Facebook, you can post videos and images, as well as long and short-form written content.
LinkedIn users mostly share links to articles, opinions on business issues, and job opportunities. This makes it an excellent place for repurposed content and factual information. If your company sells B2B services, LinkedIn is ideal for generating leads.
Summary
After reading this article, you should understand how to increase web traffic using social media. This article covered the following topics:
- What is social media?
- Social media marketing vs. digital marketing
- Five social media post techniques
- Five social media post ideas
- What social media is best for website traffic?
Now you are ready to promote your website through social media effectively.
Social Media Management from Idea Maker
If you have little experience in social media advertising, you may wish to consider hiring a professional social media management agency. At Idea Maker, we have a team of experts dedicated to providing exceptional results. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more.
