online strategies | The Un-Retired Entrepreneur

One way to increase traffic to your website is to research social media platforms to determine the best ones for your particular business needs. By doing the proper due diligence upfront much time and effort are saved as your business grows.

Whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or even Snapshot, social media can be a viable way to increase traffic to your website or blog. Let’s review a few ideas.

Plan of Action — Research Social Media

Like anything else, you want to plan things out first in order to maximize your results. With proper planning, it becomes easier to attract visitors to your website or blog on a consistent basis.

One of the easiest things to do on any social media site is to ensure your website address or URL is visible to others. This can be done in your Profile Bio or About Section of these social media sites. Not only will you get more visitors to your site, but you will appear professional, thereby inspiring trust in you and your business.

It’s also important to share your posts multiple times throughout the year on multiple social media platforms. It helps to track your posts to determine which performed best. One option is to use UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tracking, where you add small tags to your links which then feed information to Google Analytics.

Also, whenever you get questions from people on social media refer them to your website or blog for the answers. For example, if you get a question about your product or service, refer them to your product or information page. Just think a bit creatively, as any information your customer or prospect may need can most likely be found on your site.

Place some Call To Actions (CTAs) within your posts so visitors know what to do next. You can request that they comment or share on other social media sites, or simply direct them to “Visit Now”. Many social media sites have buttons for these CTAs already in place.

You can also optimize your social media profiles by ensuring that your bios, about page, and overall profiles are complete. Also, add keywords into your Biographies and About Pages. When you link to your site from social media, you create some high-quality backlinks to your site, which increases your website’s SEO.

What Can I Do Today to Research Social Media?

In addition to increasing your brand recognition, social media can become a major factor in boosting your flow of traffic. As you implement these and additional techniques over time, you will experience a valuable source of new visitors to your website or blog.

Done consistently it only takes a few minutes a day to properly research social media methods and platforms that will work best for you and your business. Along with other traffic methods, social media will increase exposure and brand awareness and over time identify you and your business as a “go-to” source for your products and services.

So set up a Plan of Action and get started taking advantage of this valuable traffic source. Get things set up and then be consistent with your efforts on a daily basis.

Here’s what you can do today…

Instead of spending weeks and months posting and tweeting without a plan, here are a few ideas that will not only save you valuable time but will increase your presence and response on social media, resulting in more traffic and engagement.

Create curiosity to get more shares. For example, use partially obscured images, use exclamations, and use words like “how” and “this” etc. to anchor curiosity
Ask questions
Participate in Twitter chats
Republish your content (share your updates multiple times)
Include images in your tweets (can use these graphic sites: Canva, Pablo, Gravit.io
Don’t transfer images from Facebook or Instagram to Twitter. (Less likely to be retweeted). Use twitpic and pic.twitter.com links instead.

These are just a few tips on how to increase your engagement and traffic with social media. Over time I will share more ideas to increase your presence on social media, thereby bringing more traffic to your site or blog.