Social Media Promotion Increases Traffic
Increasing traffic is often the number one problem faced by marketers today. And increasing traffic through Social Media promotion is a feat worth mastering! Everyone with a business knows they should be on Social Media promoting it.
Therefore, we turn to Social Media to try and get free traffic as we’ve been led to believe it’s easy. While it may be easy for some, it won’t come easy to all, but you can make it so much more simple if you aren’t trying to spread yourself too thick by using too many of the Social Media platforms.
Just because your business should be on Social Media, doesn’t mean it should be on every platform. It’s essential that you choose and nurture the Social Media platforms that work best for you.
You’ll need to know which Social Media site best suits your purpose and which do a better job at bringing your message to the right people.
It would take more time than it’s worth to perfect your Social Media promotion on all of the platforms out there, so get to mastering a few.
Most people already know that Facebook is the top social network on the internet. It is one of the best ways for connecting people from all over the world with your business. With over 1.5 billion estimated unique monthly visitors, over 2 million of these are small and medium-sized businesses using Facebook to advertise their business.
Facebook is the best place to start for your business, regardless of the industry you are in. Therefore, if you are going to try and succeed with your business on Facebook, the first thing you will need is a Facebook page that will represent your business.
Facebook is best for pretty much anyone and everyone but it does require you to have an engaging and friendly manner. You need to be interactive with your followers and give them reasons to like your page.
- You will need to have a complete profile (though this is true of any Social Media platforms) so take time when filling this out.
- A good cover photo is important… you want people to know what you’re about within about 5 seconds. And make sure you optimize this for mobile: check out your cover pic on mobile. If you have text in your cover photo, mobile view may cut it off.
- Your profile pic is a little more important as this is what people will see in the news feeds and wherever you post or comment.
- Your page needs to be updated on a regular basis with not only promotions, but engaging and interesting content as well. This way your followers know what they can expect from you and will check in if they know they are going to get new information.
- Spending a few bucks on promoting your page or boosting a post is a great kickstart for your page and cheap enough.
- Creating a call to action button on your page is important, if you tell people what to do and they might just do it!
- Keep in mind, most engagement happens towards the end of the week, and question posts tend to get 100% more comments than standard text posts. And of course images get the most shares.
- Be more interactive by commenting on other pages as your business page, gets your name out there…
A great tip with this is to find relevant pages with a huge following and comment as your business page, but work hard on this comment: what you are trying to achieve is getting a reply by the page owner. This will get your comment higher in the feed and your business page name will be seen by thousands. For example, a compliment followed by a question.
With over 300 million estimated unique monthly visitors, most businesses use Twitter to interact with prospective clients, answer questions, release latest news and also make use of targeted ads with their specific audiences.
Twitter allows real time responses and you can engage with your customers immediately. Just say you have a customer with a problem, you will be able to hear them on Twitter, and this is your chance to shine at customer service and as people will see this they’ll trust you more.
- Follow people from the same industry to see what they are tweeting about, and slowly gain your own following.
- Stay in a routine of tweeting and check all of your interactions, replying to tweets and retweeting interesting tweets from others. You will get followers!
- The key with Twitter is to stay active: the average user follows five or more businesses, and about 40% will buy from a brand they follow.
- Use the well known hashtag feature to keep up with, and be part of the latest trends and events, and for search.
- Keep in mind, tweets with images receive 20% more clicks, 85% more favorites, and 150% more retweets.
Twitter is best used for posting several times a day, so if you have the content to keep up with that, twitter is the way to go.
The average lifespan of a tweet is extremely short, this is why you need to be able to ‘tweet’ quite frequently to increase your visibility. It is also why you can get away with posting the same tweet more than once as it will only have reach for that time.
LinkedIn gets over 250 million estimated unique monthly visitors, and is ‘the’ social network for professionals.
LinkedIn is a Social Media platform mainly for B2B (Business to Business) marketing and not so much B2C (Business to Customer), although many gain traffic through LinkedIn by publishing articles to LinkedIn pulse.
LinkedIn is popular for businesses to connect with suppliers, customers, important people and potential networking partners.
- It’s great for reaching out to people with what you do or provide, so that when someone needs your services, there you are.
- You can learn many marketing strategies by joining related groups and discussions, where you can get people’s feedback and opinions.
- Some examples of some industries who would use LinkedIn is finance, marketing, consulting, sales, healthcare, event planning and similar avenues. If you’re niche is say hobby’ orientated’ or the like, it’s better to stick with the other social network platforms to start.
- If you are marketing yourself e.g freelancer, set up a personal profile, or if your marketing a business or brand you need to set up an official company page.
LinkedIn is used most, to promote yourself and/or your business by making connections with other professionals.
With about 250 million estimated unique monthly visitors, Pinterest has made a huge impact on social media in the last few years.
Pinterest is basically a visual bookmarking site where you can discover ideas and save them to your boards. Very popular with the do-it-yourself crowd, and women in particular, but all the more, Pinterest is a place to be for any gender, any company, and any brand.
- Pinterest is a top Social Media platform for a reason. It has the highest revenue per click of any other social sharing network.
- Follow boards that are of similar interest, and watch them follow you back.
- Pin interesting images, helpful content, facts, recipes, product images, anything really as long as it’s visually appealing. Repin too, your own stuff or others.
- Make sure you put your website URL in your Pinterest profile. Also pin regularly to let people to follow you, and comment with your website URL on popular pins.
- Create your boards with special keywords, and your pin descriptions, but make them short and catchy.
- Install the ‘pin it’ button in your browser for ease of use and link your website or blog with Pinterest pin button.
If your target audience is mostly women, you should definitely use Pinterest, as over half the users are women.
Google Plus
Google+ is also up there with 120 million unique estimated monthly visitors.
Like Facebook, Google+ allows you to represent your business with a company page. Creating a Google+ page for your business will help you in Google search results. Great for any pretty much brand or service, Google+ seems to focus around particular topics. This creates a great opportunity for you to segment audiences and share your content with the most relevant groups.
Using Google+ as one of your Social Media platforms, you will need to find active communities that are related to your business and interact with them. Communities are a great way to grow your list of followers, which in turn
leads to more traffic.
- Again with the profile: It is very important to make sure your profile section is filled out with useful information so people know who you are and what you’re about.
- Claim your Google Plus page custom URL: Your posts will have a big long number at the end of your URL if you don’t, which is too hard for people to remember. Do this in the ‘About’ section under ‘Manage This Page’ on your Google+ page.
- Use great headlines in your posts. Google+ posts are like mini blog posts. Google uses the words in your headline to display in search, so adding the right headline can help your post get seen in Google search results.
- Calls to action are quite important to get traffic from Google+. Whenever it’s possible, include a link to your website and ask people to share the post and comment if they liked it.
- As with any Social Media platform, images are a must. With Google+, upload the image you want separately as Google tries to include the image from the URL but it can often be the wrong size.
- ‘Collections’, a recent feature of G+, allows users to create themed boards, similar to Pinterest, where you can group your posts by topic. Imagery would shine here. Make the most of it if your business is image based.
- If you tag certain people in your posts, they will get notifications of this, which can lead to more interaction and reshares.
- Using the hashtag feature here will help a lot as any hashtags you use on Google+ could also show up in Google searches, which improves organic discovery.
- Also search for any influencers with the hashtag and see which of them get the highest interaction on their posts. These people will be great to connect with.
Always remember: Google+ is Google, which means excellent search engine results for your business!
Has this helped?
Whichever Social Media platforms you decide on, encourage your followers to share your content. They’re following you for a reason: To know about your stuff, what you do and if and how you can help them.
Knowledge about your products, service or expertise provides value to them. Make it easy for your loyal readers to distribute your content to their own networks by adding Social Media share buttons to every single blog post. All it takes is a click of a button and you’re in front of an entirely new customer base.
It’s extremely difficult to be active on all platforms unless you have a Social Media manager of some sort, so choose 2 or 3 at most that best meet your needs, and stay social!
Which Social Media platform do you find works best for your niche?
Help us out and comment below.
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