Social media is an important part of an online marketing strategy today. The goal of marketing is to gain exposure among target audience members in order to improve sales. No matter what industry you are in, your target audience is using social media in some form or another, which means that it’s necessary to have a social media presence on behalf of a business. People use social media for a variety of reasons, one of which is to connect with businesses or brands that they do business with currently or are researching before potentially doing business with them. While a social media presence is an absolute must for any business today, it’s necessary to understand that a social media page should never be treated as the final destination. A social media page should be used to deliver traffic to a business website where a visitor can learn more about what you have to offer.
So how do you get social media followers to visit your website, getting them one step closer to converting? You’ll need to consistently be sharing links that point back to your website. And not just any kind of links, but links to valuable content in the form of blog posts that exist on your website. A social media feed shouldn’t look like a stream of advertisements with calls to actions like “Visit our website here!” with a link to the homepage. That’s what paid online advertising is for. Social media pages should be used as inbound marketing tools. A social media connection will click over to your website when they see a link that interests them. Maybe it’s a link to information that will help them better understand something about your business or help solve a problem that they may be having.
Here’s an example of the impact that sharing informational blog content in your social media channels can have on social referral traffic to your website (6 months compared year over year to when the website did not have a blog and then blogged on a weekly basis and shared the links in social media):
How to Get More Website Visitors From Social Media
This made a huge difference! Sharing links to quality blog content on your site is also a way to make sure that your social channels remain active. There is no point in setting up social media brand pages if you aren’t going to actually post anything on the page. An active social media page stimulates activity, which improves your social signals for SEO purposes, and also encourages people to follow you in social media. If your account is inactive for long stretches of time, what’s the point of following you? You’ll lose current followers, won’t gain new ones, and then when you actually do have something exciting to share- nobody is seeing the message!
SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing are all directly tied together today. You can’t do one without the other two. It definitely requires a time commitment, which translates to a monetary investment, but in today’s competitive online environment not investing in SEO, content marketing, and social media is the bigger risk.
