If it weren’t for Social Media my website would never have been found. The strategy I was using for my website promotion, no matter how hard I tried, was not working at all. The traffic I got on my website was below average, and I needed to try a new tack to increase traffic on my website.

So, I started going through numerous success stories—increase website traffic by 300 or 500 percent, for instance—to learn what they were doing for better website performance. I learned most of them were using well-devised social media plans and promotional tactics, and that’s what I started doing as well.

The combination of these Social media strategies helped me increase traffic on my website by over 785%.

In this blog, I will tell you just how I did it so you can do it too.

Picking Suitable Social Media Platforms

 The first thing I did was choose social media platforms that were appropriate for my brand. Before, I just thought creating as many social media accounts as possible was the thing best to do to reach my audience. That didn’t produce any results because my message was not getting across to the right target audience.

So, I reviewed my business goal and identified my target audience. To that end, I analyzed important information regarding audience demographics: location, gender, educational background, and age.

As my website targeted business owners and students working in the field of digital marketing, I needed a social media platform that combined professional elements and trending topics. And that led me to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Quora, each with their unique follower base.

The first step to formulate a social media plan is to identify the right platforms for your business. Assess what your business goals are and ask yourself if a social media platform aligns with your brand.

You don’t need a thousand social media accounts; just pick relevant ones and develop them consistently.

Creating Appealing Social Media Content

We can find people sharing their experiences regarding social media posts that have performed well for them. And these posts vary based on the brand and their message.

So, to identify what social media content is going to work for you, you need to get out there and start posting. Not all of your posts are going to get engagement, but a large part of formulating the right social media content involves trial-and-error.

 I did the same. For a whole month, I tried different sorts of posts on my social media accounts, and at the end of the month, I analyzed the performance insights for the posts.

And you can see the result in the photo.

From my analysis, I concluded that videos, images and link posts perform the best, in that order, with my target audience. So to develop a result-oriented social media plan, I started emphasizing these posts based on their performance.

Once I know what to post, I take a different approach for the same content on different social media platforms. That’s because if I have missed out on reaching out to audiences on Facebook, for instance, taking a different approach can help grab their attention on other social media accounts.

By a different approach I am referring to different captions, different images, embedding links in images, and alternating between images and videos for the same blog post, among other things.

Another approach is to post the same content repeatedly at frequent intervals with different captions or images so that it looks varied each time. Your audience may not be online when you make a certain post so repeating the same content increases their chance of seeing it.

For example, I made the following video post on Facebook first to lure my audience into my content and get them interested in what I had to say.

My video offered a sneak peek into what my blog post was going to be about. And in a couple of days of posting the video, I made the following post on Twitter with a link to my article.

When taking multiple approaches for the same content to post on social media, like we have done here, there are a few things you need to bear in mind:

1) Don’t post modified content on Facebook and LinkedIn within short intervals. When you are posting such content, make sure there’s a gap of a month since the last related post.

2) In case of Twitter, you can revise the content once a day, since the posts have very short lifespan—of 15 to 20 minutes. And it’s advantageous to revise the content as frequently as you can, ideally once a day.

3) But again, make sure each post is visually different than your previous ones.

You can see here how I did it.

Ideal Times To Post On Social Media Platforms

As I said before, the best way to find out what the ideal time to post any of your content on social media is trial-and-error. That’s because different content has different target audience, and the time that your audience is active on social media differs from others’.

And this is exactly how I found out what content reached a large portion of my audience at what times. I made several posts on my socials and then checked the ‘Insights’ to examine their performance based on various KPIs such as engagement, reach, audience online, and so on.

 I examined Facebook insights for my posts for a whole month and came to the conclusion that my posts did especially well on Thursdays and Fridays between 3 to 6 in the afternoon.

And similarly, on Twitter the best days to post, I found out, were Fridays and Sundays.

I repeated the same process for all my social media accounts and developed a post plan.

Apart from that, the knowledge of how many times to post per day on each platform is crucial.

Here’s the numbers for that:

1) You should preferably make five posts per week, or one post per day, on Facebook. It’s the same with Instagram and LinkedIn too.

2) Again, because of the shorter lifespan, one can post 10 to 15 times per day on Twitter.

3) 2 pins per board per day on Pinterest.

I followed these numbers as best I could for my social media posts, and my posts started performing considerably better.

Using Social Media Management Tools

Posting content on social media is only the first step in winning over audience. Constantly interacting and engaging with your followers is essential to keep them interested in your posts.

But going to individual accounts and posts and clicking on each and every comment to interact with every follower is tedious and time-consuming. And that’s why social media management tools make our lives so much easier.

I use Hootsuite to manage my social media accounts. If you are wondering how to use Hootsuite, I have already written a pretty elaborate post on the topic.

Showing Engagement On Relevant Groups

Showing activity on various groups in your niche and responding to questions will help establish you as an authority in your niche. Or you can like and comment on posts made by others, too, to increase visibility for your brand.

I made a list of all the groups I had followed on social media in a Google Sheets file. Mentioning the links to each and every one of these groups in that sheet eased access to these platforms. This way I could click on the links to be directed to the ‘Group’ page so that I could engage with people in my industry.

Analyze the Results and Make Improvements Accordingly

I use Google Analytics constantly to see how much traffic is being directed to my website through various social media platforms. Whichever social media is able to produce the most results, I dedicate my efforts to that particular one. And in case some of my social media accounts are not doing well, I further research what strategies I can implement to improve their performance and increase traffic. Before I started implementing a proper social media plan and had no clue what I was doing, I was getting minimum traffic on my website through social media.

After a month of implementing a proper, well-researched social media strategy, my website’s social media performance started improving and has been getting better consistently across all the platforms.