One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years of using social media to promote my blog and business is that sometimes you need to simply “forget” about getting traffic in order to get more traffic. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should forget about other social media traffic tips, but rather, that sometimes traffic comes from simply being ‘human’ and engaging more with your audience and other users.
Most people’s first instincts are to only share updates with links to their website, especially when they have new websites or little traffic. This unfortunately does not guarantee the best results. In fact, on the contrary – most people don’t appreciate users who are too ‘salesy’ and always promoting their content or website or who are only posting updates with links to their work or website.
That’s not to say that you should never share your links on social media, but rather that you should find the right ratio between sharing your links and engaging with other users.
By following these tips, you will be able to grow your social media accounts substantially, and build ‘healthy’ profiles that will generate more traffic in the long run:
Engage with other users
Your brand’s social media engagement is the most important aspect of any good social media strategy and, to be honest, the cure to most, if not all, social media ails. Engaging is how you build up your follower numbers, how you grow your online influence, and the way to make sure your fans and followers are truly interested in your updates.
One of the things I’ve often noticed over the years is that people you are actively and regularly engaging with are much more likely to share your work and to visit your website, and many times even continue engaging with you on your website by leaving comments and sharing your content with their followers on other social networks.
Building your social media influence
Building up your social media influence will help you get more traffic in the long run. Influence is not easy to achieve, and can take a long time – but once you’re there, you will be getting much better results, and consequently, more traffic, as more people will trust you and your work.
When you’ve reached a certain status of influence on a particular social network, people will be much more likely to share your work and trust your content more – therefore helping increase your traffic. There are several ways to help grow your social media influence:
- Share content that provides lots of value to your audience – yours and other influencers’ alike.
- Make sure to post updates regularly and always be active on your social media accounts.
- Identify other influencers in your niche and build relationships with them – having other influencers backing you up will help grow your influence as well.
- Engaging often with your audience – once again, the importance of social media engagement shines through. As mentioned earlier, the more you engage with others, the more your follower base grows, along with your influence.
- Set up your social media business card using tools like Linktree or Beacon AI. Here’s how to get a Linktree free account.
- Keep in mind how all social media platforms are different. Reddit marketing is very different from Instagram marketing, for example.
- Create unique visual assets to stand out. Infographic marketing has worked for many years now!
Share other people’s work
Many people are reticent when it comes to sharing other people’s work on their social accounts. At first sight, it might look a little backward – after all, why would you share other’s content and drive traffic to their website when what you want is traffic to your website?
However, when sharing other people’s quality content, as mentioned earlier, it will help grow your social influence and your image as a great and constant source of useful information.
Not only that, but by sharing others’ updates and content, you are more likely to get shares from them in return, which in turn leads to more traffic to your website, or new followers.
With social media, the most important thing to remember in my opinion is to be human and to engage with others. A clinical and sales-centered approach will only get you so far, but by being human and approachable, you will get much better results.
Have you noticed strong correlations between social media engagement and traffic? Do you get more social media traffic the more you engage with other users?
