Your company’s online presence is multifaceted. There are your social media accounts — your Facebook page, your Twitter handle, maybe your Instagram feed and your LinkedIn profile — and then there’s your business website. And while they all work together to showcase your company and your values to a wide audience, your website is ultimately where you want your web traffic to go. After all, you may have tens of thousands of followers on social media, and that’s great for exposure and customer engagement, but your actual website is where you have the most control over content and where all of your ecommerce takes place.
How can you use your social media profiles to push traffic to your company website? Read on: here are six ideas.
- Go visual.
We’ve said it many times in this space, and it applies to much more than just driving traffic to your website, but if you’re going to post on social media, you’ve got to post photos and videos. Visual content on sites like Facebook and Twitter garner considerably more attention, more likes, more comments, more retweets, and more clicks than text-only posts. If you want to capture the attention of your followers, go visual, whether you’re linking to your website or engaging with them in some other way.
- Share fresh content.
Your social media followers can technically get to your website if they want to — you’ve included your website URL in your profile. (Right?) But you can’t just assume that followers will click it; they’ve probably been there before, and they may not see an immediate reason to go there again anytime soon. However, if you have fresh, regularly updated content on your site, such as a new blog post, share that link on social media. The newness is enticing, and with a well written teaser, you can convince followers to click over to the content on your website.
- Encourage subscriptions.
Creating a direct link to a landing page for subscriptions has always been possible on social media, but Facebook also has a Subscribe button that will allow followers to opt in for an email newsletter. Entice your followers with what they might receive in their inboxes: privileged news, useful information, discounts, and more. That newsletter will ideally contain links to different pages on your website to bring in traffic. It’s a two-step process, but it can be a highly effective one.
- Create an incentive.
Give social media followers a solid reason to head over to your website. Create a contest, offer a discount or limited edition product that’s promoted only on social media, or reward your followers with something of value to them if they click on the link to your site.
- Trade links with business partners.
Going on the idea that opinions are always more valuable if they come from a third party, you might consider a website link trade on the social media profiles of partner businesses. It works exactly as it sounds: you create a post with a link to the website of a partner or friend business, and they do the same for you. This approach can pull in a whole new audience to your website, and the recommended link appears more authentic to followers because it’s not coming directly from you.
- Promote, just a little.
After you’ve shared, say, ten or so links to fresh content on your site, look carefully to see which one is generating the most clicks and getting the most likes. Then, promote that post. Not a lot — spend maybe five or ten bucks, adjust the target demographics so it hits the right audience, and track the post to see if it’s bringing in more clicks to your site and having an impact on sales or client leads. It’s no guarantee, of course, but making a small investment in a popular post could be a good way to increase website traffic.
Direct Traffic
A big part of using social media to move traffic to your website is consistent branding. The visuals on your Facebook, Twitter, and other profiles should match the visuals on your site, so they all look like parts of a whole, and so that visitors to your site from your social media pages know that they’re in the right place.
What strategies for using social media to boost website traffic work for you? We’d love it if you could tell us about your success in the comments.