Is social media currently an integral part of your marketing strategy?
With the massive growth of social media in recent time, you canโt afford to ignore it.
It might interest you to know that there are currently over 2,300,000,000 active social media users throughout the world.
According to Business Insider, โthe top 500 retailers earned $3.3 billion from social shopping in 2014, up 26% from 2013, according to the Internet Retailer’s Social Media 500. That is well ahead of the roughly 16% growth rate for the overall e-commerce market in the US.โ
Here’s the point, social media marketing is now a must for every business.
Going back to the question I asked above, if your answer is “no”, you should definitely include social media in your overall traffic generation strategy. If not, you will be missing out on a significant source of potential online shoppers.
As your competitors continue to implement a robust social media strategy, itโs critical for your brand to also do the same. You really canโt afford to miss out on the massive opportunity to interact and engage with your audience and prospects on social media.
Letโs check out some social media stats:
- According to Newsroom, Facebook had โ2.01 billion monthly active users as of June 30, 2017.โ
- “Social is driving much bigger increases in retail traffic than any other online channel. Social media increased Internet Retailer’s share of e-commerce referrals nearly 200% between the first quarters of 2014 and 2015.” (Business Insider)
- As of November 2016, 86% of adults were using social networking sites in the U.S. (Pew Research)
Numbers donโt lie. They show that there are lots of opportunities for you on social media to connect with a massive audience.
I hope youโre already using social media to promote and market your brands. And to help you even further, Iโve made a list of 5 on-site changes you can do right now to boost your social media traffic.
5 On-Site Changes To Grow Your Social Presence
1. Always Publish The Right Type of Content
Itโs one thing to write content for your blog. Itโs another thing (the most important thing) to write the right type of content.
Before we proceed, I want you to understand that content length is also critical to your success, both regarding social media shares and search engine rankings. Typically, the experts advise that you should always shoot for longer form content (at least 2000 words).
However, you donโt have to stop at content length alone; there are so many other things you should pay attention to if you want your audience to share your content.
- Forget about quantity and focus on quality. Itโs often easy to think that more content will increase your search engine ranking and social shares. However, this can only happen when your content is of high quality. One super quality piece of content is infinitely better than five mediocre articles.
- See what your readers are most interested in. For your audience to massively share your content on social media, you have to give them exactly what they want. The best way to know this is by reviewing your analytics data so you can easily see what type of content is attracting the most attention. With this, you can create content in the future that better aligns with your audience’s interest.
- Find out what your readers have previously shared. Another way to entice your audience to share your content is by taking a clue from the past. Know what type of content theyโve shared in the past and write more of that.
When you write the right type of content, every other thing will automatically fall into place.
2. Use Relevant Images
While trying to create unique, actionable, and high-quality content, donโt be carried away and neglect the enormous benefits of rich media. You should always make it a priority to implement images on your posts.
According to Twitter Media Blog, โadding a photo URL to your tweets can boost retweets by 35%.โ
Similarly, in a blog post titled โWhy Content Goes Viral: What analyzing 1 million articles taught usโ, Noah Kagan suggested that โhaving at least one image in your post leads to more Facebook shares.โ
Adding images to your posts will not only boost social media shares, but it will also:
- Keep readers longer on your website.
- Add more meaning to your points.
- Increase the post’s engagements.
Fortunately, with lots of amazing image editing tools like Canva, creating high-quality images for your blog posts has become super easy. You just have to get a good image from any attribution-free photo site like Pexels or Pixabay, and then head over to Canva and beautify it as you wish.
I have experimented on posts with and without images in the past, and trust me, itโs always better to add relevant images to your posts.
3. Install A Good Social Sharing Plugin
Let me be blunt, if you make it hard for your readers to share your content, they probably wonโt.
However, if you make it simple for them (like a couple clicks of the mouse), theyโre 100% more likely to share it with their social media friends.
Hereโs an example from my blog:
Most people prefer sharing content when they finish reading, and thatโs why I have my own share buttons below my blog posts.
Once a reader clicks on any of the buttons, they will automatically share the post with their social followers either on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or even schedule it on the Buffer app.
Itโs that simple.
There are lots of plugins you can use to simplify this process, including Social Warfare, Simple Share Buttons Adder and the one Iโm using, Social Snap).
Integrating any of these social media sharing plugins makes it insanely easy for your readers to share your content with their followers.
However, if youโre not using a social sharing plugin yet, youโre typically asking them to first copy your link, create some assisted content, open up their preferred social media channel, and then share it.
Not many people will do this.
Make it easy for them.
4. Minimize Your Posting Frequency
Conventional wisdom suggests that you should post fresh content frequently because the search engines reward freshness.
This is undoubtedly a solid strategy, but only applicable if you can maintain quality standards โ if your quality slacks a bit, so will your social share counts.
Hereโs the most interesting part: You can publish as often as you want on your blog, but you may not wish to push each piece through your social media channels.
Recent research from HubSpot shows that frequently posting to social media networks does not necessarily mean more interactions and engagements.
To understand this more, hereโs an excerpt from the post:
However, this is not to say that posting fewer posts on social media is guaranteed to increase engagements… What HubSpot is saying is that your social media posting frequency does not necessarily affect your posts’ engagements.
You should rather focus more on the quality of your posts. Before you push any post harder on social media, make sure it has lots of value and has all the recipes that could trigger shares.
To an extent, this is trial and error. You have to figure out what works for you, and it starts by posting once/day and seeing how it turns out.
These posts will help you:
- How Often To Post On Social Media According To 14 Studies
- Best Frequency Strategies: How Often To Post On Social Media
5. Ask Your Audience
The key to massive social media traffic is simply to get as many people as possible to share your posts through their social media channels.
But the problem is often not knowing how to entice more people to share your posts willingly.
The simplest and most effective way to do this is by asking your readers to share your content. Most people that read interesting blog posts often forget to share (even though they wanted to), or they may think thereโs no need to share.
Asking them, however, will remind them that sharing is important both to you and to their friends who might also like the post.
Follow the steps below to ask your readers to share your next piece of content:
- At the end of each post, make a statement like โIf you enjoyed this post, donโt forget to share.โ
- Email some influencers in your industry and ask if they will share it. As long as your email is short, direct, and you have something worth sharing, the result might be astonishing.
- Share the post on social media and ask your followers to help you spread the news by also sharing it with their followers. Always remember that quality is important โ if you have something valuable, I bet theyโll (almost) always share it.
Never shy away from asking people to share your posts. If done correctly and politely, it can generate dramatic results.
How To Maximize Your Social Media Efforts
You may firmly believe that your current social media strategy is working, especially if youโre happy with your results so far.
However, a few key changes on your website may convince you to believe that youโve only just begun scratching the surface.
Iโve given you five actionable on-site changes that can boost your social media traffic. I hope youโll try one or all of them in the future.
And when you do, come back here and let me know what the results are! I’ll be waiting for you in the comments!
Like this post? Don’t forget to share it!
Want to level up your social media and blogging game? Here are a few hand-picked articles for you to read next:
- 15 Social Media Tools That Will Instantly Increase Your Engagement
- Best Instagram Scheduler
- Two Important Things (Other Than Length) To Make Your Long Form Content Rank
- 21 Twitter Tools That Every Twitter Power User Must Know Of
very Nice article that gives insight full explanation about Brand24. After reading your point to point explanations about functionality and usability of tool,
Hi Harsh,
Well, I got to know something unique today. Till now I have only read that you should post more on social media but here you mentioned to share less.
I guess it narrow down to quality vs quantity approach. One should write better excerpts which can attract more visitors rather than focusing on blantly sharing their same post over and over again.
Thanks for sharing it, Harsh.
-Shafi
Hey Kim
I totally agree to you hosting webinar sometimes become very difficult without any technical experience but with clickmeeting it becomes so easy thanks for sharing with us!
Hello Kim Barloso,
Itโs really 100 % true that, If we are doing any kind of online marketing means we cant succeed with a single strategy, I got know many more things from your post it was very useful for me,
Good shout over here ๐
Indeed Webinars are also now days trending when it comes to make more sales of our product, apart from blogging, podcasting
and emials, people are now bending towards the webinars. The pros of this is that people can enjoy video learning through
live videos and why they should turn in for a particular product.
Hi Harsh,
I am happy to peruse this article. Your instructional exercises have helped me rank for some catchphrases. Your instructional exercises are a definitive arrangement of my issues.
I visit your blog week by week to gain some new useful knowledge.
Finally a post that describes with more realistic details on how to use social media since I really can’t get any decent traffic from them. Now I have the opportunity to test some good recommendations. Thanks Harsh.
I was aware of all the points mentioned above except, point no. 4 – minimize posting frequency. I was thinking just opposite of it. Thanks for clarifying this point.
Hi Harsh,
Great tips and I’ve started focusing more on quality as opposed to quantity. I think it’s important to write content that helps solve your reader’s problems, usually, this consists of writing long-form content.
It’s great to see that you’re using the Social Warfare plugin. I use that plugin as well and I love it.
The plugin makes it easy for people to share your content. I can definitely say that my content gets a lot of shares since I started using this plugin.
Thanks for sharing these tips with us. I have no doubt they will help bloggers increase their social media traffic.
Have a great day ๐
Susan
Hi Harsh,
There are millions who are relying on the social media to boost their business, and the tips you have shared are amazing. I really appreciate your effort for sharing this fantastic post.
Have a good week ahead.
Right content posts mixed with right visuals does a lot better than just right content across Social media channels. Tools like Canva is really very useful and helps in getting the right visuals… Doing all these rightly in a consistent manner will for sure increase social traffic. I strongly believe that Quality and Consistency should be maintained.
thanks Harsh Agrawal for such a good tips. i really need them a lot.
hope to these data will help me to boost up.
I think Pinterest, Stumbleupon, Flipboard, Twitter works great. I have used managed flitter it is good for managing twitter and insta. Buffer is all in one and i think we should use buffer.
I am glad to read this article. Your tutorials have helped me rank for many keywords. Your tutorials are the ultimate solution of my problems.
I visit your your blog weekly to learn something new.
Hi Harsh,
That’s a great blog to show how to boost our traffic. But there are many social sharing plugins but do you think that SOCIAL WARFARE is the best?