Getting Traffic With Social Media
Social media is a wonderful inexpensive traffic generator. But, before you waste your time doing things without reason, it’s a good idea to try to sit down and understand what it takes to use social media as a real traffic generator.
Imagine a traffic generator that sends you, day after day, inexpensive but loyal and targeted traffic, where all you have to do is be social, engage, and share. If you want to be successful using social media as a traffic generator then it’s important to separate messing around on social media to truly using it as a way to grow your website traffic.
Know Who You Want to Visit Your Website
If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it 1000 times; know your audience. It’s imperative that you learn who your audience is before you even begin trying to attract them to your networks plus send them to your website. Otherwise, you’re seriously wasting your time. People who aren’t in your market don’t want what you’re selling.
- Spy On Them – Follow people who you think are in your audience and observe them. What do they share? What do they like? What do they tell their connections on social media? This is a great way to find out what they read, what they do in their free time, and really, who they are.
- Get To Know Them – Get to know them in a more intimate way via engagement on social media. Social media is first and foremost a social thing – a way to connect and communicate using technology.
- Find Out What They Want – By following them and “spying” you can find out what they want in many areas of their life. Likely, if you’ve done well picking audience members to spy on you’ll learn a lot that you can use to build products that solve their issues.
- Find Out Who They Know – When you find out who they follow and know, you can use that information to connect with those people that they trust. If influencers are friends with you and share your information, that will make an impact on your audience because it will build trust.
When you know for sure who you want to visit your website you can ensure that your content and information is focused on that audience. After all, how can you deliver something to your audience that they want if you don’t know who the audience is?
Try to Be Interesting (Hint: It’s about them)
In order to be interesting and share attention-grabbing information that resonates with your audience. If you ever go to live events, you know that the more other people talk about themselves, the more they look highly on the person they were talking to.
- Post Images & Video – When you post images, people are a lot more likely to look at it and share it. Images can help make a serious subject less painful, as well as help explain complicated topics in fewer words.
- Use Humor – Anytime you can make a point with humor you’ll get attention. If you can turn that attention into clicks, that’s even better. This is why knowing your audience is the number one thing you need to do in your business no matter what.
- Ask Questions – If you’re not sure what to say to get attention ask an important question that needs to be answered. Give them some choices and try to incentive them to answer, perhaps link to a form on your website for them to use to answer.
- Be Active in Your Life – This might seem odd, but if you don’t have an interesting life, then you can’t really be that interesting on social media. Get away from the computer and live your life, you’ll be happier and it’ll show and people will be drawn to you.
- Show Your Results – If you’re promoting something that has an end result post about it. You can use images of yourself or you can use images of your audience who have used the product.
- It’s OK to be Imperfect – The truth is no one is perfect. But, there is only one you. You are the only one that can add you to the picture. Therefore, always be yourself because if you’re not, it’ll eventually show.
The more you can turn all these things around to be about your audience, the better. When your audience feels listened to understood, and thought about they’ll be much more likely to click through and go to your website, sign up for your email lists, and become part of your inner circle.
Actively Participate After All Social Media is Social
Read that again. Social media is social. Therefore, while automation is awesome, it’s not everything. Find time each day to go through your social accounts (maybe one per day) and look for questions that need answered. The more you can answer questions the more people will notice and trust you.
- Stick to a Schedule – If you have no plan you may waste time. After all, there is no better time sucker than social media. If you want to be super productive, set up a schedule and stick to it for posting, sharing, and engaging.
- Don’t be a Spammer – Each social network has its own unspoken rules when it comes to how often you share a post. The trick is to share it in a different way. It can be the same link, but you can describe it differently in your blurb.
- Optimize Your Content – Everything that you publish, no matter where, should be optimized. That means it should have the right words that get the attention of your audience (keywords), and a call to action. Plus the page should load fast and everything should work. Also, each network has its own way to show content, ensure that you understand the images sizes and the rules.
- Engage With Your Audience – You want to post regularly, plus you want to engage with others on their pages as well as answer comments on your posts. If you post something and it gets even 1 comment, be sure to comment back.
- Check Your Metrics – Nothing is complete until the data is checked. You never know what is working if you don’t check the numbers. You need to know where all the clicks come from that go to your website so that you know that what you’re doing on social media is working. Otherwise, why do it?
As an active participant, you’ll also learn how to use the network better. After all, each network has its own special flavor that you’ll need to get to know in order to use it to its utmost traffic generating level.