Every website needs traffic, visitors that will read your material and, hopefully, respond to your call to action — as in buying a product. Social media is one way to get people to your website, what is composed of services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,Instagram, and Pinterest, to name a few. Here’s how you can use social media to drive more traffic to your website to increase your sales.
Be consistent with your updates
Social media thrives on what’s new. You can do your part by updating your blog consistently and sharing those updates on your social media site. Facebook and Twitter are the most popular sites for sharing your news; Google Plus, Digg, Reddit and LinkedIn should be considered too. If you cannot update your site daily, endeavor that every story be interesting, factual, carefully researched and even beneficial to your readers. Work on creating magnetic headlines or attention-getting titles that bring people to your site.
Use images with your postings
Many social media sites allow users to attach images with their postings. The advantage here is that an image can catch someone’s attention better than text does alone. Use an image that is published with your article or put something else up that will draw user attention.
Make use of social buttons
If people find your article and they like it, what tools do you have to help them spread the word? The easiest way to help people assist you is to include social media buttons for people to like, share, thumb up or otherwise click on. Services such as AddThis, ShareThis and WP Social Share are easy to install on your blog. Place these buttons at the top of your articles, then monitor responses.
Host a Twitter chat
One way to get attention to what you do is to host a Twitter. The way that this works is that you put out a notice to everyone in your Twitter stream that you want to host a chat on a certain date or time. For instance, if you like to talk about cars, you might put out a short message (tweet) as follows: “Join us on May 8 from 3 to 4 pm ET for a #carchat. Share your news & retweets. ” At the appointed time start tweeting, perhaps by fielding questions and contributing answers. Help other participants get their messages out and they’ll help you as well.
Offer social media-only specials
There are times when getting people to come to your website to do business can be a chore. Your goal shouldn’t be to simply increasing web traffic, but engaging with your customers. If the people who follow you are on Twitter or Facebook, encourage them to retweet and “like” your updates. You can reward followers with social media-only specials, by providing a coupon code useful toward a future purchase.
Analyze This
No social media campaign is useful unless you are able to analyze its results. With an analytical tool such as Google Analytics, you can discover how people find your website and what they do when they get there. If you discover that certain social media sites send more visitors than others including people that buy something, then increase your involvement with the top performing sites and cut back elsewhere.