How to make sense of multiple social media channels and prioritize what works to increase visitors to your company’s website and convert leads to paying customers.
If there were a way to compute the average amount of time people waste on social media each year, the number would likely be staggering. But if you think social media is just for bragging about your Candy Crush score or looking at pictures of your high school classmates’ kids, you’re missing a major business opportunity. If you can effectively harness the power of social media, you can use it to drive increased traffic to your company’s site. Once you get customers off the networks and on your own turf, you have the opportunity to convert casual visitors to leads or even sales.
Once you start sharing interesting, useful content via the appropriate social channels, you get the opportunity to relate to your potential customers in a unique and potentially valuable way. Here are five ways social media can help increase your company’s site traffic so you can start closing more deals.
1. Showcasing Expertise
Social media gives you the opportunity to show (not just tell) potential customers why your company is an industry authority. Take advantage of features like LinkedIn’s group discussions and Twitter chats, and contribute to the discussions. Doing so makes your business part of the conversation alongside major players, increasing your name recognition and industry authority.
You can also used LinkedIn’s portfolio feature to showcase examples of your company’s work in a sleek gallery that shows potential B2B clients why your brand should be trusted. You shouldn’t underestimate LinkedIn as a potential source of traffic for your company’s site; in fact, 64% of all corporate website visits that originate from social media come from LinkedIn. Once you’re established as a leader in the field, you’ll start seeing greater traffic on your homepage.
2. Direct Customer Interaction
If your website is just sitting there in its corner of the web waiting for visitors to drop by out of the ether, you’re wasting its potential. Getting active on social media and engaging directly with followers means your potential customers are putting an online “face” with your brand’s name. Each Tweet, Like, or Share is an opportunity to get potential customers more interested. If you play your cards right, they will follow your breadcrumbs all the way to your homepage.
3. Empowering Analytics
With smart analytics offered by the various social media platforms, you can look at exactly what’s working and stop wasting time and marketing dollars on what’s not. You’ll know what types of posts drive traffic to your site so you can post more of that type of content.
4. Tuning Your Ears
If you carefully monitor your social media feeds, you’ll begin to notice patterns and determine what types of content most strongly engages your followers. Once you know what that content is, you can start creating more of it and putting it – you guessed it – on your corporate website. This way you can capture traffic from social media, steer it to your site, and satisfy the readers with interesting, engaging material that answers their questions and meets their needs.
5. Harnessing and Building on the Power of SEO
Your SEO strategy is only half-baked if it doesn’t cross over to your social media channels. You can coordinate keywords across your social channels to help drive traffic to your site, mirror keywords from your site in social networking updates, and set up website content and social media to work as a well-oiled, self-feeding machine.
Making it Work
If you are playing fast and loose with your social media strategy, you’re missing a major source of website traffic that can potentially provide your business with large volumes of additional leads. Using social media effectively requires an investment of time and energy into determining your goals, analyzing the efficacy of your campaigns, and following through on the insights you gain. You may need outside assistance to help you make sense of the potentially confusing world of social media, especially if you are a busy marketing manager with many other fish to fry. Once you get specific with your social media strategy, you’ll start reaping the benefits and seeing an increase in valuable site traffic so that you can focus on converting.
