Social Media is one of the key sources to pull traffic to your website and increase brand visibility. Whether you are struggling to grow your niche blog traffic or attract target audience to your website for raising sales, the Social Media marketing strategy plays an important role in changing the entire scenario. This blog post describes why social media is important and how to increase social media traffic.

Why Increase Social Media Traffic

This is the prime and obvious question; many novice webmasters ask the digital marketing professionals during the consultation. Even after leveraging hard efforts on SEO and other marketing strategies, it has been seen that something is missing. Many leading marketing professionals excel in filling this gap for their clients’ business to bring in quality traffic.

Apart from bringing in high traffic volume, the social media platform is the ideal place to engage the audience in several exciting ways. The increasing volume of traffic means your website will have greater opportunities to generate leads. More long-term audience engagement means that the buyers will be returning to your website again for new stuff. Information spread on the social media accounts help to influence the audiences’ purchase decision. Now, there are several questions to answer in this context:

1. What are the best platforms that can help to get social media traffic?
2. How to design the social media marketing strategy
3. Which sites play the crucial role in directing traffic to the business website?
4. How to feed the social machine

If you are struggling with all these questions and trying to achieve high-end social media traffic volume, following are some tried and tested strategies to revamp your existing online marketing program.

1. Create Accounts on All Major Social Media Sites

If you compare the traffic density statistics on different websites, you will find that the social media platforms have greatest volume of active online users throughout the day compared to other platforms. This increases the chances for the webmasters and bloggers to pull the target audiences from these sources to their business website/ blogs. There has been a tremendous increase in traffic referrals on all leading social media platforms during 2011 to 2014. Following are some important statistics:

• There has been a whopping rise of more than 277% in the sharing traffic alone on Facebook.
• Over 93% posts attractive positive comments and likes while engaging the audiences have photos attached to the text contents.
• Surprisingly, the rate of driving traffic with Pinterest’s has tremendously grown over the years to about 685%.
• Twitter is the third largest social media source to attract audience response and traffic using hashtags and images. Tweets with photos get social media traffic almost double to that of those with no snaps.

2. Build Power Packed Profiles on All Social Media Accounts

This is the second most important step to get started with the social media account management. Unless you have an impressive profile describing your business, product line, blog niche or services (depending on the type of promotion required), the audiences visiting your page will not be able to develop a proper understanding and will simply bounce out of the page. Your profile must be 100% complete with requisite photos and other information. On each individual social media account including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, Reddit and others, you fill in all the categories properly.

3. Post Important Links on All Social Media Platforms

It is important to put your website and blog links on all social media accounts to grab the attention of target audience. Including links to your websites and blogs allow the audiences to follow them to reach your site and access the contents. Apart from these, always post status updates with latest blog posts and new website contents. The regular followers will be able to access this data to find more information. This will help to generate more leads from time to time. The social media accounts response slows down if there are no regular updates. You can also customize the website and blog post links on some social media websites.

4. Adding Social Media Buttons

Your blog and website also get some amount of traffic from search engines and other networks. To increase social media traffic, you can divert this traffic by placing social media buttons on your website, blog and other places. Do not forget to add these buttons to each of your blog posts for optimal response. These buttons allow the audiences to share these contents on their social media profiles with simple click operation giving your blog and website a greater volume of audiences and leads.

5. Post Quality Contents Regularly on All Social Media Accounts

The quality of the contents you post on social media will highly determine the success of your social media marketing campaign. Unlike website contents and blog posts, you do not have to stick to writing long posts. Short updates are enough to engage the audiences. Write your content in form of information in about 50 to 80 words. Attaching images and explainer videos can multiply the response. Here are some statistics to show the impact of refreshing images, info-graphics and multimedia on the audiences across different social media platforms.

• Posts with photos get up to 39% higher response on Facebook
• On Google+, posts with videos get more than 28% engagement, the audiences give +1 to 94% of posts with images and 39% of posts with animated GIFs
• 98% of posts with images receive comments on LinkedIn
• People prefer to share 75% of posts with YouTube links
• Tweets with images get over 200% successful audience engagement

6. Choosing the Right Time to Post the Content

 This is the most difficult task to accomplish. Unfortunately, you do not have any specific data available to show at what time you can get maximum of social media audience response. One of the reasons for this is absence of geographical limits to the social media site access. Your fans are located worldwide. Hence, the time of using their accounts will also vary accordingly. The best way to find the suitable time for posting is to go experimenting with different time slots. This may take a month of time to complete the research process. Once you have found the right time slot, use the post-scheduling feature on different social media accounts to achieve best response from every status update.

7. Use Keywords in the Contents and Updates

Like SEO strategies, you can make the most of your social media content when you place high conversion keywords at the right place. These keywords are able to engage the target audiences better than other terms. You can research a bit online to find the best suitable keywords for your business niche and product line. Also, you can specifically find a list of terms people frequently use on different social media sites.

8. Use Hashtags in Your Contents

Using hashtags has emerged as a new trend on social media especially on Facebook and Twitter. Updates with hashtags attract more audience response and help to start a discussion. Placing one or two hashtags in every update widens the spectrum of reaching greater audience base.

9. Leverage Efforts on Interaction and Engagement

You can interact in several ways with people, groups and communities on social media sites. You may choose to create a group on Facebook or LinkedIn. Thereafter, you may start discussions, release posts and take other relevant actions. This will help to get closer to the members of the group who will thereafter take interest on your posts. You can also groups and discussions started by other members. While doing so, always remember to join places relevant to your business niche. Do not forget to spread your website and blog links with the comments.

10. Follow the Pattern of Promotional Content on Different Social Media Sites

Not every social media site is similar. All social media sites are different with their own features and utility. However, you can use all these sites to promote your business and interact with audiences. Follow the pattern of contents people post on every individual site. Try to use the same language to impress the audiences on the site. Your promotional strategy for every single platform should be separate and unique.

Some Parting Words,

Employing right strategies to increase social media traffic is beneficial for the business in several ways:

• They help to generate high traffic volume within a short span of time
• Provide an excellent platform to keep the audiences informed and engaged with periodical updates
• You will be able to build a strong network of followers and fans
• It will help to build a relationship with the audiences to achieve feedback and reviews

It is not tough to launch a social media campaign for business promotion. The content distribution across different social media platforms help to fulfill the targets easily and quickly. The abovementioned tips will help the businesses to increase social media traffic and audience response faster.