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.