Social media is useful for lots of things – building your brand, connecting to your audience, seeing what’s trending in your niche. But it’s also great for building traffic. Here are some ways to boost the traffic your social media sites bring you.
Build Backlinks
Drive traffic through your social media sites in the same way you drive it to your regular site – through back linking. Employ the same strategies like article marketing, guest posting, forum posting, and so on, but instead of a link to your site, link to your social media sites.
Blog More
Set up a blog for the sole purpose of driving traffic to social media. Along with blog posts that are published frequently, include links to your social media sites and buttons so that readers can like through your blog. Be sure to include a call to action that tells them what they’ll find there.
Exclusive Social Media Content
For each social media profile, update with different content. This gives your audience a reason to find you on each channel. If instead you post the same content on Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn (for example), they have no reason to visit your other social media profiles.
Post Videos
Start a video production schedule and flood popular video sites like YouTube with videos that are short, entertaining and instructional. Each video should have links to your social media platforms in their descriptions. Again, tell viewers why they should check out your social media content as well.
Write Press Releases
Press releases tell the world news about your business and there are press release directories that can get you a great deal of exposure. It’s easy to write press releases about your social media channels. Write a PR to let the world know your brand is now on Facebook and tell them what they can expect to find there. Write a PR each time there’s any change at all to your social media profiles.
Curate Content
Earlier in the series I told you about news jacking. News jacking is a form of content curation, which means sharing relevant content for your readers. You can drive traffic to your social media sites by making them the go-to for current news of interest to your readers. You can also share other content in addition to news. Make sure they’re hot topics and you add your two cents.
Encourage Participation
Finally, take advantage of what makes social media so cool – the opportunity it gives your audience to engage with you and with each other. Ask questions and share interesting content to get discussions going on your social media profiles. On all of your other online marketing channels, encourage people to come and join the conversation.
Just like you would with your website, monitor your analytics and focus on the traffic strategies that are paying off. When one method gets you results, rinse and repeat.
Tony Phelps
