5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Social media is a fantastic tool to help start conversations with prospects and customers. However, if those customers don’t transition to your website then you may not be reaching your sales and marketing goals. A few tweaks to your social media strategy may help you gain the traffic you desire.

#1 Make Your Content Searchable

Sites like Twitter allow you to include tags in your posts, aka hashtags#. Pinterest allows you to identify categories and include tags. Use these features in your post so that your prospects can readily find you. This simple tactic will help attract more people to your social media profile and subsequently more people to your website.

#2 Obvious Contact Information

You might be surprised how many business owners have social media pages and profiles but their website address is a real challenge to find. It’s a simple thing; make sure your URL, email address, and even your phone number are on your pages. Be completely transparent so prospects feel comfortable trusting you. Additionally, the more obvious your URL is, the more likely a prospect is to click on it and visit your website. One thing I always do when I set up Social Media profiles for new clients is make sure that their profile picture and their cover photos have a URL in the description. If someone clicks on those images, they have a website to click through to…(smart, huh?)

#3 Incentivize

Give your social media followers a reason to visit your website. Host a special promotion for them. Give something away, or hold a contest or sweepstakes. For example, you might offer a printable coupon for Facebook followers only. In your promotion, include a link to the promotional page. Ask me about a service I use to handle contests.

#4 Value Driven

Before you post anything on any social media site, make sure it provides value to your audience. If it doesn’t have a clear benefit, don’t post it. That means often keeping personal posts and business posts separate – unless your personality and personal life are relevant to your brand. In my opinion, there are four topics that I stay away from on my business page – sports, politics, sex & religion. They have no place on your business page and for sure will alienate a group of people who could be a client or customer.

Test and track your posts to identify which posts generate the most traffic and interest. Also consider including a call to action and a link in some of your posts, and test and track those as well. Our Social Media Management platform can do this for you! Check it with a free account.

#5 Tease

Some social media posts should lead directly to your website or blog. Include a few sentences teaser on your social media page and a link to read more. You can do this on any of the social media sites, from 140 characters on Twitter to tantalizing paragraphs on LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.

There are dozens of tactics for using social media to drive prospects to your website. At the end of the day it requires two key steps. The first is to make sure you’re providing value to your prospects. The second is to test and track your result so you know what works.