If you are even somewhat related to the digital world and have an understanding of how digital media works, you would know how social media plays an important role in boosting a website or a blog’s business.
What started as a medium of communication between individuals is now largely used by businesses and the biggest companies in the world to boost their growth.
The main motive of all websites and blogs on the web is to gather maximum traffic, that includes both organic traffic and social media traffic.
While organic traffic is something that websites do not have control of, social media traffic is something that businesses can largely use with their understanding of social media.
This article is a guide on getting and generating more social media traffic and conversions to your website. But before that let us understand what social media traffic is.
What is Social Media Traffic?
Different social media platforms account for more than 26% of website traffic. This makes social media the second largest source of traffic for any online business.
While direct traffic means that people who are visiting your site know what they are looking for and they intended to visit your website in the first place.
Social media traffic, which is generated from social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. might not know what website they are going to look at.
Users click on the website link on social media mostly out of curiosity to find what the website is about. They generally click on the link to a product or an article that they have found interesting and that redirects them to the website page. This is called social media traffic.
The social media traffic is quite different from other sources of traffic. This is one place where you, as a website owner, have the opportunity to attract your consumers or readers with catchy headlines and titles and product thumbnails. This way you can convert visitors to customers.
You also have the liberty to choose which articles you want to put on social media.
So you paste the links of those articles and write a catchy caption for it. Same goes with products too.
In the case of blogs and article-based websites, more people are redirected to your website from different social media platforms than people directly visiting your website.
That is why website owners give more importance to social media traffic. Also, social media traffic to a website comes mainly from mobile users.
Readers are mainly surfing their mobiles all the time and when they find an interesting article, they click on it and land to your website.
That is why it is important to prioritize and have an understanding of what exactly should go on the website’s social media page.
Can You Buy Traffic to a Social Media Page?
If you have the slightest idea of how social media marketing works, you would know that buying traffic for a social media page is totally possible.
There are two ways to do that. Generally, every social media platform has a proper legitimate way through which you can buy traffic, mostly via the advertising networks that are owned by the social media platform itself. This is what promoted posts and promoted accounts are.
The other way to buy traffic to the social media page is buying it from a third party seller, like Google AdSense.
Most websites obviously settle for buying traffic through promoted posts or promoted content because that is the legitimate way and gives you real traffic.
When you buy traffic from third parties or from sources that are not very trustworthy, what happens is that even though you get traffic, the conversion rate and engagement rate is very low or sometimes zero.
So it does nothing good for your website.
Let us now look at how you can buy traffic to various social media platforms.
Facebook:
The best way to buy traffic to your Facebook page is the proper usage of Facebook ads. This helps you buy traffic and also followers on your website.
From the traffic that is generated through the use of Facebook ads, you can get huge amounts of information about your users and then you can use this information for your website to build its database.
But if you do not want to invest in Facebook ads and want something cheaper without having to go to third parties, you can adjust the ‘targeting’ section in settings of Facebook that is present in the Facebook ads.
It is the cheapest and most effective way to get valuable traffic to your website from a social media platform.
But the thing about Facebook is that it is sensitive to fake followers, so you have to be very careful about the traffic sources.
You might end up spamming your dedicated audience and making it harder for them to reach you in case they have doubts or queries.
Twitter:
Twitter has Twitter Ads that are available to you to promote your website on Twitter and it is absolutely free of cost.
Twitter Ads can be used to either promote your Twitter profile or promote some content or even promote some specific tweets.
However, Twitter Ads are not as dynamic as Facebook ads. That means the amount of valuable traffic that Facebook ads generate, Twitter fails to do that.
So a lot of websites rely on buying valuable traffic from other sources more than Twitter ads.
Also, the thing with Twitter is that even if you are promoting a tweet, it won’t really count unless there is some engagement on it. Which means that if a user just reads the tweet without taking any action on it, it will not affect your traffic in any way.
However, you can always buy fake engagement on Twitter. Of course, you can also buy real engagement on Twitter too.
Instagram:
If you buy traffic on Instagram legitimately, it is a great network and will help you go a long way in increasing conversions on your website.
The thing with Instagram is that if you want to go viral with a post or with the product, you have to promote new posts rather than promoting old posts.
The visibility of a promoted post on Instagram is very time sensitive, so there is no point wasting that precious time on promoting an old post.
Since Facebook owns Instagram, Instagram ads work just the way Facebook ads do.
In fact, for people who want to buy Instagram ads, they actually have to do it through their Facebook accounts. But the deal that you have to follow here is that the targeting options of Instagram are really limited as compared to Facebook.
When you are selling an ad on Instagram, you have to make sure the settings are limited to Instagram-only settings so that the ads are not restricted on Facebook, which is a far more reliable and larger source of social media traffic.
LinkedIn:
Not a lot of people think of LinkedIn when they are planning to buy social media traffic from different social media platforms. And there are reasons for that.
LinkedIn is not a social media network that is driven by traffic. Also, there are no tools through which you can check the engagement or traffic that your website is getting.
But if you still plan on buying traffic from LinkedIn, it is better to buy it from third-party sellers.
That is because when you are using LinkedIn, you would want very specific traffic that is based on location or demographically.
On LinkedIn, any website would want views and users that actually hold value, which means you, want to build your network with connections that can be potential employees or influencers or partners.
To be honest, the third-party sellers on LinkedIn will do nothing good to boost traffic to your website or to even build a connection. So the ideal way if you want to target traffic based on location or demographic is to use LinkedIn’s own ad system.
LinkedIn ads might look like a PPC network, but better than that. It works extensively within its systems to find connections for you and to recommend your website’s page to people in your network.
How to Easily Double Your Traffic from Social Media:
Just building a social media profile and sharing your content on it will not be sufficient if you want to double your traffic from social media. Here are some great ways in which you can do that.
Share your own blog posts on your own social media page:
This still remains one of the best ways to promote your content on your social media handle. Make sure that you follow the 80-20 rule, which means that your blog post should not be the only thing you are sharing.
Keep sharing other content also along with your blog posts in this given ratio and this will significantly increase your traffic.
Research well as to which posts have performed the best on your website and then share those posts on your social media handle.
Customize and optimize your own sharing schedule according to your target audience:
If you Google the best suitable time to share a post on social media, you will get a number of answers and that will confuse you. There is no specific answer to this question because every website has its own niche and own set of the target audience.
Different age groups and different target audience will be active on social media at different times. So you have to understand your target audience best and which schedule is best for you to share your content on social media.
You have to ask questions to yourself like,
- When is your target audience the most active on social media
- How much time they are spending on social media on an average
- Which all pages there visiting more.
Once you have figured out the answers to these questions, you will be able to draw a timeline for sharing your own posts and that will optimize traffic on your website.
Be a part of Facebook groups and other such groups on other platforms:
This works in a similar way to that of blog commenting. Engaging in Twitter chats, joining Facebook groups of your own community, etc. gives you more exposure to the other comments and to what your audience really wants.
You also get to interact a lot with other brands and with your target audience and this gives you a deeper insight into everything.
But more than anything, this strengthens your presence on social media, that in turn increases your brand visibility and in general awareness about your brand.
Make sure that you are not constantly promoting your brand on such platforms, because that gets really irritating for other users. Engage in proper communication because that is what social media is for-.
Make sure the copy is different for each platform:
What a lot of websites do is they use the 140 characters Twitter copy for every platform, that is wrong. Get as creative as you want with 140 characters on Twitter.
On Instagram, you can either go for really cool one-liners or good short stories because Instagram has no limit to the length of your caption.
On Facebook, use a really nice thumbnail for your article and a short caption to support that because on Facebook people generally do not like reading long captions.
Also, on Facebook, while you are writing the copy, make the call to action prominent if you want to increase traffic and conversion.
Use relevant hashtags in your captions:
Hashtags have been reduced to just making a photo look cool with plenty of them. but if you know the proper use of hashtags to boost your content on Twitter and Instagram, it goes a long way in boosting your traffic.
Do not overcrowd your posts with 15 to 20 hashtags. Before you use a hashtag, search for what kind of posts are coming under that hashtag.
All said and done, getting traffic from social media is not as challenging, if you have done your research right and if you know, how to do it the legitimate way.