Social media probably stands among your top traffic sources. Regardless, marketers still complain about social media being an ineffective tool in driving traffic and conversions.
What most marketers don't know is that the share of a company's marketing budget set aside for social media marketing has been predicted to rise by 25% in the next five years. Clearly, market researchers believe social media has the potential to elevate business outcomes.
The key to successful social media marketing is directing prospects back to you website. Here are seven smart ways to boost your social media traffic.
1. Focus On SEO
According to Chloe Mason Gray there are five things to consider with respect to SEO and social media.
- Marketers believe that links shared via social channels impact search rankings, and Google has corroborated the fact in the past.
- Social media profiles show up on search engine results, often in the topmost results when a brand's name is searched.
- Social media search engines also deserve to be optimized, because your prospects may want to check your presence on social platforms.
- Just because Google says that it doesn't strongly rely on social sites for search ranking, doesn't mean that it never will.
According to Larry Kim, there is an overlap between social engagement and search engagement:
Remarkably high social engagement rates correlate strongly with high organic search CTR, which correlates with high rankings. […]
What’s happening here is that Facebook Ads, Facebook's news feed algorithm, Google AdWords, and increasingly Google organic search are all systems governed by machine learning systems that reward remarkable engagement with greater visibility.
For on-site search benefits (on social media), you can follow these tips:
- Use keywords in your description text
- Use platform specific search enhancers, like hashtags and @mentions on Twitter and LinkedIn, and tags or keywords on Facebook
To increase your organic ranking, you need to boost your social media engagement rate.
2. Identify Content That Works And Amplify It
An important part of social media marketing success is optimizing your content strategy. Since the effectiveness of your content inherently affects your engagement rate and search rankings, you need to be certain you share only the best content.
To identify your top performing content, you could use a content analyzer like TrenDemon, integrated with Google Analytics. The integration will give you real-time alerts on your top content and the best social channels to use to amplify it.
You could amplify your top content using these smart tactics:
- You could use hashtags to amplify content visibility. You could begin with hashtag research using a tool like Keyhole to find the hashtags that can give you the most visibility.
- You could set your social posts on a repeat schedule on a social media management and content curation app like DrumUp.
- You could enable social sharing on blog update newsletters, using an email marketing tool like SendGrid.
3. Activate Brand Advocates
By activating your brand advocates, you not only increase your reach, but also your influence on social media.
There are two types of advocates that you could consider – Influencers and micro-influencers. While companies are heavily investing in influencers, few have begun to develop their micro-influencers. The term micro-influencer refers to anyone who has a small but relevant following and is capable of driving desirable action for your brand. Employees, partners, happy customer or social fans, anyone could be your micro-influencer. When your content is shared by employee advocates, it is likely to receive 8 times more engagement.
Like an employee advocacy program, you can create a brand ambassador program for your brand advocates. Community marketing tools like ReadyPulse help you motivate ambassadors to share.
You could prompt shares in the following ways:
- Communicate with your ambassadors and take their feedback seriously
- Offer your a discount on your product/service in exchange
- Arm your advocates with your content and make it easy for them to share it
4. Enable Social Share Plug-ins
You can use social media plug-ins to help readers share your content. There are multiple ways in which you can enable social media sharing, a popular one being the “Click to tweet” mechanism where readers can share a short and interesting piece of your writing.
It is important to consider mobile users when creating your plug-ins because a fairly large amount of readers prefer reading content on their mobile devices. You can also insert social media buttons on your blog to connect your readers with your social media profiles. When doing this, it is important to use social buttons that don't obstruct mobile scrolling and are placed where most of your readers are active.
When enabling social share buttons:
- Use heat maps to determine the best place to insert your social share buttons. According to a study most readers never get past the half page point.
5. Study Your Competitors' Tactics
With social media performance benchmarking you can breakdown your social media traffic. You can compare how the same target audience is responding to your competitors' social media posts. You can create a list of key performance indicators to compare yours and your competitors' social media performance. Doing that will help you identify how your competitors are building their social audience and that will give you valuable insights on how to build yours.
You can identify the following by looking at your competitors' social media pages:
- The best performing social channels for your niche
- The best days and times to post
- The best types of content to post (topics, visuals, humor, quotes, etc.)
- How often you should respond to your fans
- The contests, outreach tactics that are likely to work:
If you can identify what exactly causes their fans to be engaged, there's nothing like it. Social media benchmarking tools like Quintly can help you identify where your competitors are ahead and which tactics of theirs you should emulate to get ahead in the marketing game.
6. Keep Your Social Media Audience Engaged
34% people prefer customer service through social media, and on average, 1 in 3 of them shift to competitors when ignored on social platforms. Clearly, keeping your social media audience engaged is of prime importance.
You don't have to reply to every post, but you should reply to the ones that are important. You could use a social media listening tool like Brand24 to identify and sort your mentions by priority (sentiment analysis) so you can respond to the urgent ones immediately.
Apart from providing quick and considerate customer service, you can also create fun contests and activities to keep your audience engaged.
7. Use Keywords That Increase Post Engagement
On social media networks, there are some keywords that drive more engagement when compared with others. They have been observed to draw attention and interaction. You could use them in your social media descriptions to increase the impact of your social media content.
Here is a list of keywords that can help you increase your social media engagement:
You can find a complete list of keywords in this post.
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* Adapted lead image: 
