Tips for increasing social media traffic to your website

So, you want to achieve the holy grail with your social media, or rather, actually drive traffic to your website? Well, that's easier said than done! Simply sharing articles on Facebook usually won't achieve the desired results. That's why this week's article focuses on experiments you can try to see which measures are most effective in increasing traffic to your website.

Here are our tips for increasing traffic from your social networks to your website:

1. Increase traffic: Award a prize

When you publish a blog post, try testing whether offering a prize increases the number of interactions and shares. Ideally, try this with two different versions: one with and one without a prize, so you can compare the results. Announce the potential prize along with the article title in the image or description that will be displayed when shared on social media. You can further boost the appeal by requiring users to share the article to enter the giveaway.

Naturally, the benefit should be attractive to your target audience. Otherwise, you won't see much of an impact!

2. Include links in the text for sharing the article on Twitter.

To increase engagement with your articles, you could simply make sharing even easier. Instead of just burying the Twitter or Facebook links at the end of the article, scatter one or more links throughout the text. Of course, your article must be interesting to your target audience for this to work – and you should first test whether this approach produces the desired results.

Therefore, only do this with interesting statistics, graphics, or other things that your target audience actually finds interesting and useful.

3. Sharing does not equal increased traffic; let the data speak for itself!

Just because your articles are shared more often doesn't necessarily mean you'll get more traffic to your website. If one of your users shares the article on Facebook or Twitter and none of their followers click on the link, it ultimately does you no good. The more users who click on a shared link, the more valuable that share becomes.

In most cases, posts on Twitter are shared most frequently. However, to be sure, collect data in a list for at least a month and then compare it. This way you can determine which platform offers you the most value!

What matters, therefore, is not how often your blog posts were shared by your users, but how often their followers subsequently shared the articles further. Naturally, it's worthwhile to invest more time in the platforms that bring you the most value and, if necessary, to test strategy changes for other platforms where nothing is working.

4. When opinion leaders share your articles, the results improve!

Well, this point should be self-explanatory: when an opinion leader shares one of your articles, interest in that article typically increases significantly. This means it will be shared more often, receive more likes, and in most cases, traffic to your website will also increase. In fact, you can often see a sudden surge in visits from one day to the next!

It's therefore worthwhile to create a list of opinion leaders in your industry or regarding your product. Then consider what these opinion leaders would share and write the corresponding articles. Instead of doing it the usual way, aim from the outset to be shared by specific people.

Have you never thought about writing this way before? Then it's high time you changed your approach – at least as a test!

5. “The #habits of the ____ most people”

We all have a tendency to question ourselves and devour materials on what others are doing right and how we could improve. If you look at the most successful articles from Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, or any other platform, you'll see that all of these providers capitalize on this fact.

So why not simply use the same formula? After all, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. All that's needed is a topic that fits the product or industry! So write your next article about "The Habits of the Most Productive People" or "The 10 Habits of Particularly Popular People."

What are the fundamental headaches in your industry? Being as productive as possible? Delivering outstanding presentations? Think about what you yourself frequently grapple with and what others are doing right. Chances are, you're not the only one in the industry asking these questions. And that means an article on the topic will find fertile ground! If your article is then particularly well-written and helpful, you'll increase the likelihood of it being shared many times over, thus driving more traffic.

Just try it out. You can't really go wrong or lose anything, can you?

6. Being shared more often does not necessarily mean more sales.

Unfortunately, increased website traffic doesn't automatically translate into higher sales or registrations. The key question to address when experiencing a high click-through rate is why these users aren't converting. In a recent article, we discussed how to respond to this and leverage user feedback to your advantage. In short, you need to pinpoint where users are abandoning your site.

It's possible that your users might expect a different product or content based on your article. This should obviously be avoided: your articles should be relevant to your target audience and your field of expertise! On the other hand, a website that's difficult to navigate, too many intermediate steps, long loading times, or other issues can also cause users to click away and you to lose traffic.

In short: if the click-away rate is astronomically high, then you should find ways to survey a smaller number of users about the reasons and adjust the website accordingly.

However, if your users stay on the website, that also has a positive effect on the SEO your website.

Improving your social media strategy, as we've seen, doesn't automatically mean you'll sell more products or gain more subscribers. You'll need to figure out what your users want and adapt your online presence accordingly. This also means that the strategy and actions of company X will automatically differ from those of company Y. Their target audiences are different, and therefore their needs are different. Consequently, there are no universal solutions!

So what can you do? Quite simply: test as much as possible, and always multiple versions of a website, strategy, or approach. In online marketing, unless you act unintelligently and condone animal abuse or other abhorrent actions, you can't really go too far wrong (and yes, there are indeed companies that have posted content that caused a major uproar. This example is not made up!).

In marketing, there are only better results and less good results. In the worst case, you achieve no results at all. But once you get the hang of it, you can repeat what has worked before!

Always analyze the data and base your decisions on the results of that analysis. You can only win that way!

Do you have any further questions or would you like a consultation? MIC Looking for a group to help with social media, content management, or SEO? Then don't hesitate to contact us today. We're always happy to help and look forward to hearing from you!