The best marketing efforts rely on connecting with their community via social media. Here’s how to find the right mix to drive traffic to your website
By Paul Gettis
Chief Digital Media Officer
Troy Media
CALGARY, Alta. – Only 20 Fortune 500 companies engage with their customers on Facebook, while 83 per cent have a presence on Twitter.
This isn’t surprising. Most Fortune 500 companies still rely on traditional marketing methods. Plus, they’re still learning how to use social media effectively.
What top companies fail to realize is that their new customers are on social media channels that they’re not on. Also, those customers are not captivated by traditional marketing.
The best marketing efforts rely on connecting with their community via social media. But there are so many platforms to choose from.
Which one do you choose? You have to find the right mix to drive traffic to your website.
Here are three ways to convert social media traffic into website visits:
Posting using the four Us
Using a similar strategy to creating headlines that get results will stop your potential visitors from scrolling past your website.
- Useful – Ensure your content is useful to the reader. If it’s not useful, they won’t click on it.
- Unique – The information has to be unique to them. Posting basic information gets passed over as followers feel that post was someone else’s.
- Urgent – Providing a sense of urgency gets the follower to click now, versus moving on to the next post.
- Ultra-specific – When the post is vague, your followers won’t click on it since they don’t feel it appeals to them. Track chats on category-specific forums and the comments they leave on specific blogs. Prepare posts to entice them.
Link back to your website
With link clicks accounting for 92 per cent of all user interaction with tweets, you’re set up to succeed.
Look beyond linking your profile back to your website and posting random posts hoping to entice people to click. People will stop clicking.
Curate content that your followers can’t help but to click on. When they click the link taking them to some other businesses website, set up a badge to appear on their site, linking back to yours. You can even set this badge up in such a way to show created content enticing them to click.
You don’t have to spend all your time creating content. Focus on providing useful, unique, urgent and ultra-specific content that your followers can’t help but click on. It’s okay to borrow that content.
Now a link to your website is on every website that you share.
Engage your following
Know when to post on social media for maximum engagement. Posting while your followers aren’t on social media limits your engagement and your potential for increasing your website traffic.
Use visuals to grab attention. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. Never feel limited by character count when you have visuals to communicate for you. Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than any other type of content.
Pay attention to how your following reacts to your competitors. Did they have a bad experience with them?
Seventy-one per cent of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others.
Swoop in to right a wrong. Those who have been wronged will visit your website and, if convinced, become a loyal customer of a company they can brag about.
And in the end …
Using social media the right way will send tons of visitors to your website.
By engaging them with real useful conversation, leading them to your site is a cinch.
But skipping out on providing them with clickable content will leave you scratching your head wondering why your strategies aren’t working.
Now that you know how to get them to your website, how will you convert them to customers?
Paul Gettis is managing director of Cargo Digital and chief digital media officer for Troy Media Digital Solutions Ltd. Paul takes pride in helping people all over North America grow their business with digital marketing, focusing on lead gen, SEO, paid traffic, demand generation and marketing automation systems.
© 2017 Distributed by Troy Media
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