Social media marketing has become much tougher as more and more brands are competing for attention.
Building traffic from social media is tough but doable.
I was honored to host #DigitalOlympusChat Twitter chat to share my tips on building traffic from social media. I decided to collect my answers and write this FAQ on how to generate both clicks and engagement from your social media updates.
Here’s what I came up with:
Should You Invest in Building Traffic from Social Media?
Digital publishers don’t have too much choice when it comes to generating free or cheap traffic. Organic search is the most obvious choice but depending on a single traffic source is never a smart marketing strategy
There are various issues with building organic search visibility online publishers are facing these days including – most importantly – Google’s obvious willingness to keep people using their site instead of leaving to publishers’ pages.
This makes generating social media traffic one of the most important digital marketing strategies as the way to diversify your outbound marketing channels.
What are the Best Ways of Building Traffic from Social Media Sites?
1. Ask a lot of questions
According to Twitter, when the Tweet copy includes a question mark, it gets 25 percent more clicks
Text Optimizer provides a nice feature allowing you to research questions around any topic. Simply enter your target query, export the report, and email it to your social media marketing manager to build social media updates around them:
Text Optimizer is the semantic analysis tool extracting related concepts and questions from Google’s search results. Google has accumulated years of data and they definitely know what interests their users, so by decoding Google’s data you can rest assured those will resonate with and engage your target audience.
Furthermore, you can use Twitter search to monitor questions people ask on Twitter and participate in those discussions directing people to your content for more information:
2. Post updates on relevant trends
Post updates on relevant trends and tie them in with our value proposition. For example, if everyone is discussing a breach of private data, post your content on securing privacy.
You can use Tweetdeck to discover popular trends each time you are there interacting with your Twitter audience or scheduling updates:
3. Tweet the same URL more than once
Repackage tweets: According to Moz research, the lifetime of a Tweet is on average 18 minutes. Posting your updates several times allows more people to catch it. MavSocial has a feature for that.
(MavRepeater helps you recycle social media content on Twitter and Instagram)
4. Use ViralContentBee.com
Viral Content Bee (Disclaimer: This is my project) is the social media platform that allows you to get your content shared on Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Tumblr, Mix, and Flipboard:
5. Participate in Tweet Chats
Twitter chats like #serpstat_chat, #vcbuzz, etc. bring value, interaction, and traffic. You can discover relevant Tweet chats here. This is a great way to build traffic from social media.
6. Create mini videos
Native videos are known to trigger a lot of social media interactions and clicks, so creating one to accompany your URL is a great way to get more traffic. This slideshow maker has a solid collection of templates for you to put together social-media-friendly videos in seconds:
7. Share “Best of” lists and tag everyone featured
Create and tweet “Best of” lists tagging all featured people or blogs. These always generate a lot of retweets from featured experts and bloggers that keeps building your audience and hence traffic.
[Tagging users that were mentioned in a post generates re-shares and clicks! Tagging on Twitter is the easiest, but you can also tag on Facebook too]
8. Use Facebook custom audience
Re-use your existing email list to reach your current customers and subscribers on Facebook. This is a great way to re-engage those people who are already familiar with your brand. Don’t forget about Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) to ensure that you have customers’ permission to use their emails.
9. Monitor your social media traffic
Finally, you cannot improve what you are not measuring. Whenever you are running a long-term social media traffic generation update, monitor the results using tools like Finteza, a web analytics platform with a huge focus on conversion optimization.
You can build funnels and use their native advertising tracking to better understand how social media users are interacting with your website. On top of all, you can re-engage your users with their re-targeting option to serve targeted content to customers who have previously shown slight interest in it:
What Social Media Platforms Work Best for the Digital Marketing Niche?
Digital marketing is the easiest niche when it comes to building traffic because all of us know how to use social media and we use it daily.
From my experience, the best social media platforms in our industry are (1) Twitter, (2) Facebook and (3) Linkedin. However I know marketers who swear by Linkedin as the most effective one.
All in all, it all comes down to how much time you are willing to spend to build your audience on each network. You can make any of them effective if you engage in networking and relationship building on a daily basis.
What Tools Help Boost your Social Media Traffic?
I wish I had more time for more tools! There are just so many great ones. I explained my social media promotion steps here. Here’s the recap of tools I mentioned above:
- For social media listening: @Agorapulse and Tweetdeck
- For collaborative sharing: @ContentCal and @VCBuzz
- For scheduling @MavSocial
Also BuzzSumo for finding influencers, promoters of your content and competitor research!
There are many more social media tools I have failed to mention but you can play with any and find your own favorite ones.
Finally, building traffic from social media requires time and commitment. Experiment with tactics and tools and use social media ads to generate more clicks from those updates that appear to be doing well organically. This is the best way to invest in more traffic without spending a fortune. Good luck!
