Your target audience — no matter who it includes — is on social media. The numbers speak for themselves:
- The average adult in the United States is active on 7 social media accounts
- 70% of social media users check their accounts every day
- More than half of social media users use their accounts to research products
- 90% of people buy from brands they follow on social media
If you’re not using social platforms to engage with your audience, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to drive traffic to your blog.
Whether you’re just getting your business on social media or you already have social accounts that you know should be more active, you came to the right place. With the actionable tips that follow, you can jumpstart your social media strategy to drive traffic to your blog, better engage your audience, and boost your content’s overall ROI.
Quick Takeaways
- Marketers report that increased web traffic is one of the top benefits they enjoy from social media marketing.
- Brands should choose social platforms based on where their specific audience is most active and engaged.
- Optimized social media profiles make your brand appear more trustworthy.
- Brands should be sharing blog posts on social media frequently and consistently.
- Visual content makes your social media content exponentially more shareable and engaging to users.
The power of social media to drive traffic
According to Social Media Examiner, 9 out of 10 marketers cite increased web traffic as a top benefit of social media marketing (hint: this means your competitors are already doing it).
The key to maximizing this benefit is to use your social media platforms intentionally to amplify your content. Social media can make content more visible, shareable, and engaging. It gives your audience an easy, familiar way to interact with your brand that fits right into their regularly scheduled activities (scrolling social media feeds). Over time, this helps you build a relationship with your audience that increases brand awareness and customer loyalty.
8 ways to drive traffic to your blog from social media
Choose the right social platforms
Not every platform is for every brand. In fact, trying to maintain an active account on too many social media accounts is likely a bad idea — especially if you’re just getting started. If you’re a B2B SaaS company, for example, LinkedIn should be a priority. If you’re leaning on influencer marketing to sell a consumer product, Instagram and TikTok will likely be higher on your list.
When you’re choosing your social platforms, stay customer focused. Do your research to make your strategy informed.
Consider this chart on teen social media usage:
Without doing audience-focused research, a brand selling a product for teens might make the mistake of starting with Facebook — the most popular social media platform overall around the world — without realizing that it’s actually the least likely to resonate with their audience.
Choose the social platforms where your audience is most active and engaged. Once you establish a social media presence and process for managing your strategy, you can grow it from there. Rather than try to do everything at once, start slow and build on your success.
Share your content regularly
Are you sharing all of your blog posts on your social media accounts? If you’re not, it’s time to start right now.
Customers want content to come to them. Even if they like your brand’s content, they’re not going to sit down and visit your website every week to check for a new blog post.
When you consistently share great content, you earn followers, and those followers then see your content on a regular basis without having to go look for it. They’ll also engage with it through likes, clicks, comments, and shares. Those actions increase your brand visibility, which earns you more followers, and those followers see your content on a regular basis . . .
A virtuous cycle has begun. All from you simply sharing content on a regular basis. I highly recommend using a content calendar to help you create an active, consistent posting schedule that won’t fall through the cracks when other priorities pop up. You can also use tools like Hootsuite to manage posting across accounts and automate the process.
Share it more than once
Social media can help you earn compounding returns on your content when you share it more than once. Here are a few ways to do it:
- Identify which of your blog posts have been most successful (you can use Google Analytics and your CMS analytics dashboards to find out). Share those posts again to drive even more traffic.
- Update old content that has become outdated, then share the new version to give it fresh visibility.
- Capitalize on opportunities to share old posts when they align with trends or when followers ask a question about a specific topic you know you’ve covered on your blog.
Optimize your social profiles
We spend a lot of time optimizing our websites, but what about social media profiles? In many ways, followers expect your social profiles to do the same job your website should. Your social profiles should reflect your brand image from a visual perspective, have a clearly communicated value proposition, answer frequently asked questions, and make it easy for customers to get in touch with you.
Here are some easy steps you can take to optimize your profile (good news — it’s easy):
- Upload a high-quality, brand-relevant profile image
- Make your bio and “about” info complete and accurate
- Link to your website
- Make your profile photos and handles consistent across platforms
- Use keywords so your social pages appear on SERPs
An optimized social media profile has ripple effects that help drive traffic to your blog. People can recognize your brand (and are more likely to follow when they do). Optimized profiles also build brand trust so that followers feel comfortable engaging with your accounts and sharing your content.
Make your content shareable
On social media, content is easily shareable by nature. But there are still a few things you can do to make your followers actually want to share your content more often.
First and foremost, make it focused on customer needs. When people find value in your content, they’re more likely to find it engaging and want to share it with others. This means you can craft blog content intentionally to create pieces that will succeed on your social accounts.
As a starting point, consider the reasons people follow brands on social media in the first place:
Once you’re creating content that aligns with these motivations, you can make it even more shareable with the two most important attention grabbers: killer headlines and great visuals. These make your content more interesting and exciting at first glance, making people want to read them in the first place and share them on their own profiles.
Finally, use social sharing buttons on your blog post pages. When you do, your blogs become shareable right from your website with one easy click.
Check out more platform-specific strategies in our how-to on shareable social media content.
Promote your content
It’s true that organic is best, but there are still some real benefits to promoting your content on social media. Earning organic traffic is getting harder as more brands do it, and promoting can give your accounts a quick boost that it needs to jumpstart organic growth in the future. Social media platforms offer valuable targeting tools that can put you on the right track for reaching your target audience, helping with engagement and follower growth.
Social platforms also have detailed reporting processes, so you’ll know exactly how well your efforts are working.
Use compelling visuals
If content is king, visuals are the crown atop its head. There’s just no doubt about it: your social media content needs to be visual in order to earn engagement and drive traffic to your blog.
BuzzSumo reports that Facebook posts with images earn 2.3X more engagement than those without them. Tweets that include Twitter cards see 300% higher engagement than those that don’t. Users share video content twice as much as any other type of content.
If you want to drive traffic to your blog, it’s essential you’re using images and videos in both your blog posts themselves and in the posts you publish to share them.
Engage with your audience
Last but not least: engage with your audience on social media! It’s not enough simply to share blog posts and hope for the best. You build relationships, grow engagement, and make your content more visible when you:
- Engage with your audience in the comments section
- Answer their questions and messages
- Create community through groups and discussions
- Respond to feedback (good or bad)
- Stay generally interactive on your accounts
Social media engagement is also one of the best ways to learn more about your customers, tweak your strategies to resonate more with them, and show your brand personality. Ultimately, all of this builds a stronger presence and helps you drive more traffic to your blog and website.
Drive traffic to your blog with awesome content
Even the best social media strategies don’t stand a chance if you aren’t creating consistent, valuable content for your audience. The team of writers and SEO experts at Marketing Insider Group can deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every single week for one year or more.
Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service to learn more or schedule a quick consultation with me to get started!
