All business owners and marketers have the same goal: they want more traffic. There are a variety of ways to get traffic to your site: PPC, SEO, writing blog content, social media advertising and so much more. The problem is some of those options can be expensive and time-consuming. If you aren’t getting the numbers you want from your social media content, try some of these ideas to help grow your reach and referral traffic to your site.
What is referral traffic?
When you have a visitor come to your website from another source, other than a search engine, those views are considered referral traffic. When someone clicks a link on a social network and is then taken to another site, tracking software, such as Google Analytics counts that visitor as referral traffic. The originating website is called the “referrer” since it refers to traffic from one website to the other.
5 Easy Ways To Drive More Referral Traffic From Social Media
1. Increase Social Shares
Investing in promotion on social media is a must. Yes, shares are just a vanity metric, but sharing can mean that it is an engaging post and content that you shared. According to Larry Kim, he found that Facebook posts with extraordinarily high engagement rates – anywhere from 6 to 13 percent – also tended to have above expected organic search CTR. So, keep that engaging content scheduling in your social profiles for more opportunities to keep traffic up.
2. Mention Other Businesses
One way to really extend your reach is by mentioning businesses in the social messages that you are sharing. Whether a company is mentioned directly in the content you created or if they have a similar audience to you, mentioning several brands in a Tweet or Facebook post can be beneficial to increasing your reach and organic traffic. For example, when I was managing When I Work’s social, one of their all-time best Tweets was because of a simple mention of Evernote in a tweet. With that, it received 50 retweets and a little over 100 likes. With that extra reach, the blog post that was being promoted received a large number of views.
15 Productivity Tools Successful People Use to Work Less – Featuring @evernote! https://t.co/8ltB6wrqXs pic.twitter.com/Amae7rduOU
— When I Work (@wheniwork) February 5, 2016
3. Use Visual Content
There are so many more ways to reach more people. For example, one blog post can be broken down into a video and put on YouTube, or it can be designed into a SlideShare. Both of those channels have great Domain Authority and you could start ranking for specific keywords through those channels. At the end of each repurposed content, make sure that there is a CTA back to your original post to maintain that traffic.
Some of my favorites tools to use for creating visual content:
4. Connect With Influencers
Research from Twitter shows that 49 percent of consumers seek purchase guidance from social media influencers, and 20 percent said that a Tweet from an influencer inspired them to share their own product recommendation. This also ties back to mentioning other businesses. In the content you’re creating, reach out to influencers for a quote so you can mention them in your social posts and, hopefully, as a thanks for utilizing their thoughts, they will share your content to their audience which could be in the 10,000+ followers. It’s best to also make a list of influencers in your industry for easy access to their content that they publish
Once you have this list make sure you interact with them:
- Follow them with your social media accounts.
- Ask them questions.
- Share their content.
- Include them in your blog posts as resources, let them know via email that you link to them, and give them credit in your social media posts.
- Really like something they say? Call them out on! Highlight that awesome-ness with fancy visuals.
5. Advertising
Facebook is a very powerful tool for advertising to your target markets. Although, if you want quick engagement and views on your content, a simple ‘Boost’ on your page’s post can be an easy way to get numbers. Sometimes, all it takes is $5 to reach your fans and pick up more organic/viral reach numbers.
These are just a few ways to drive more traffic from your social media posts to your website. What are some other tips you would share with others that want more traffic from social?