Social Media Traffic

Using different Social Media venues as part of your marketing plan can greatly increase your traffic. More traffic means more people, and more customers.

You can use the content you have already written on your blog. Expand your audience by properly seeding the social networks with your work. It takes a little elbow grease and some planning but has very effective results.

Here is an outline of some of the steps you can take to…

Get Social Media Traffic

Top 3 Steps to social media traffic:

1. As soon as you publish your article on your blog you then go to your social media sites and share it with your followers there. The first stop would be the larger networks like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.

Don’t just post your link though – have something to say that will engage your audience enough to click through to the main article.

2. Later in the day – do the same thing.

3. Here is the BIG secret… Do it again, and a fourth time! By striking at different times in the day you are hitting up your audience. They actually are checking their social feeds and/or this is the second time they see your “tweet” and they finally have the time to go to your blog post.

If you hadn’t “reminded” them they would have forgotten all about you.

There is one potential drawback to sharing too often is the possibility of annoying a follower who starts to feel you are crowding their space. I am never too concerned with the whiners. My job as a marketer is to inform, try to help, and bring attention to where the help is. If someone is going to complain and delete themselves from your list, it is probably for the best for both parties.

For the most part, the fact that you have posted the same link to your social media network in the same day won’t even be noticed. If you hadn’t shared on the different times in the day, they wouldn’t have seen your post at all.

Post throughout the day but still be careful not to SPAM. Make sure you are posting deliberately and with purpose. Posting every few minutes with willy-nilly and unrelated posts is a little spammy and WILL get noticed. Not in a good way either.

Make sure what you post is of value to your followers and believe that you are doing THEM a solid by bringing attention to your post.

Scheduling to Increase Social Media Traffic

To help you promote your new posts to increase your traffic from social media sources, it is a good idea to map out your postings ahead of time. Make a simple schedule. The schedule includes times of day, networks, number of times on each specific network, and an outline of ways to introduce your content so it isn’t a full repeat.

Be careful of automating this. You can, but there are a few mistakes that should be avoided.

The biggest mistake I have made using automated social sharing is using more than one plugin, feed, or service – all at the same time.

What would happen is:

1. I would post to the blog
2. The plugin sent it to Facebook and Twitter
3. Facebook sent it again to Twitter
4. An RSS feed service sent it AGAIN to Twitter and Facebook!

Oops!

Experiment with the number of times and the schedule of times and days so you will be able to track when your audience is most active.

The number of times you show up in a followers feed depends on the number of people THEY are following. You want to share your content often enough so you will be seen over the herd but not a continuous string of posts. Generally you can post more often in twitter, next would be Facebook, then Google+. Places like LinkedIn, Tumblr, and other Web 2.0 services should probably be treated like a blog and only post the once.

Another thing to consider is the more often your followers engage with you and your posts on Facebook, the more often you will show up in their feed. Knowing this you can “prime” your audience by being conversational and engaging in between your promo feed’s.

Again – remember to make each Tweet, or Share, a little different by having different lead-in’s to your content. Write it in a way that will interest your audience enough to click through to the main content on your blog.

Some ways to do this is by asking questions, inspiring curiosity using winning headline formulas, and using conversation starters or teasers.

Test out your responses by using some of your best converting subject lines and headlines.

Use the Power of Social Media

Use everything each social media site has to offer to your advantage. Did you know that you can post a link on Facebook and before you click “share” you can alter the headline and content that was aggregated to your post? You also get only so many lines too, so you want to be clear and concise.

Twitter allows for only 140 characters ~ BUT ~ posting a photo or graphic really shows up in the feed.

Google+ is a better place for writing a more wordy intro to your content and engaging with people in your circles. This allows for a larger arena to add more thought to your message.

Take the time to research how to best use each platform and use that to your advantage.

Encourage your followers to share. The more they share the more people will see your stuff. Although anything going “viral” is rare and nearly impossible to MAKE happen – the only way any of your blog posts will go viral is through using Social Media traffic.