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Every inexperienced social media marketer makes it sounds easy that the more you post on your social media accounts, the more traffic you’ll receive. But it’s really not that easy.
If you’re still new in this arena, you need to spend more time learning the proper tactics on how to do it properly. It’s possible to gather a huge amount of traffic from SM, but it takes time to reach that goal. Even experienced Internet marketers are finding it hard to use Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites to their fullest potential.
Should You Really Care About Social Media Traffic?
If you care too much about your website traffic, then you should put emphasis on how to gather massive social media traffic. Social media is one of the biggest referrers of traffic that you can use.
In a study conducted by Shareaholic, it was shown that Facebook alone had given 17.41% overall traffic to hundreds of websites. The number didn’t include the people who are already subscribed to Facebook and returned later.
Although the percentage is quite small, the results are surprising. The traffic that those websites received was quality. This means that the people who were visiting those sites were very engaged.
So, what should you do to increase your traffic from your social media accounts?
1. Know Your Readers
In this way, you can surely obtain an engaged audience. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of followers you have on Facebook, if they don’t re-share or like your posts, it’s still a failure.
When you know your readers, you can get the right followers who can show your posts to more people, who are outside your circle.
To understand your target audience, you should ask yourself this: why do these people want to learn about your niche. You should also consider the importance of your niche to your audience and how they like to learn through your site.
Unfortunately, there’s no exact tool that can give you proper answers. The only way to answer your questions is to wait and observe your audience. You can visit several forums or other blogs (that are very similar to your niche). From there, you can understand how those people interact and what they like to read and re-post.
2. Add Social Media Sharing Buttons to Your Site
Adding those social sharing buttons to your own site can help you gather more traffic. However, you should only place them on specific pages. People will never share your product pages or your Terms of Service page. In fact, adding those buttons will only hurt your traffic as they will only distract your visitors. Instead of increasing your conversion rates, they’d actually decrease the rates.
The best place where you can add those buttons is your blog. Your readers and visitors will share your content to other people, as long as the content is free.
3. Choose the Right Channel
Social media marketing is a long-term strategy. You need to invest time and resources to obtain better traffic from social channels.
To find the right channel, you should know what networks your audience hangs out. Your niche might have several options. Others might only have to pick one.
You may narrow it down based on your visitors’ age. According to Business Insider, Facebook is great for older demographic while Tumblr and Vine are ideal options for younger demographic.
One of the effective strategies to find the right channel for your site is to spy on your competitors. You may use free tools, like BuzzSumo, to know how their audience shares their content and to what social media.
4. Provide Value
Once you’ve understood your audience, you’re now ready to deliver value to them. It’s a faster way to grow your online presence. But you must do it with consistency. This means that you should be active on social media. You’ll never grow if you dropped off for one month and continued the next month.
To build value, you should focus on topics that your audience will love. They could include pictures, videos, blog posts, and infographics. But don’t overly promote your niche.
For instance, for every 10 pieces of self-promotional, you should give a piece that’s non-promotional. There’s no rule as to what ratio should you follow. But always balance your content.
5. Avoid Sharing Too Much
You might have 10,000 followers on Facebook. But if you share too much content in a way that your posts take up most of their feeds, some of them will unfollow you. The reason for this is that they might think that you’re a spammer.
How often should you share content? Take a look at the study of Buffer and find out the number of times you should be posting your content to what media. According to the study, posting two times per day can give you sufficient likes and comments. If you do it more than that, the engagement will drop off.
5. Share Old Posts
To maximize the traffic you’re getting from social media channels, you should share your old posts, rather than focusing only on new posts. This strategy can double or triple your traffic. Then again, you must still maintain the ratio of promotional and non-promotional posts.
6. Track Results
Even experienced marketers track their results on a regular basis. Tracking your results will give you an idea of what strategies you’ve been following work and don’t work. From there, you can enhance your strategy to double or triple your traffic.
You may use Google Analytics to analyze your overall traffic. This tool will tell you which social channels are giving a boost to your traffic and help you figure out why some channels aren’t enhancing your site’s traffic.
Conclusion
Social media marketing takes a lot of planning. Drafting your first plan can take several hours to complete. Then, executing it becomes harder. You must follow those strategies for several months before you actually see results. Most of the time, they won’t be impressive.
But, as long as you’re consistent, and you keep at it for at least a year, you’ll start to see great results. Currently, you’re still investing time and resources to finally maximize social media channels.
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