5 Easy On-Site Changes That Will Skyrocket Your Social Media Traffic Overnight

• Save

Is social media currently an integral part of your marketing strategy?

With the massive growth of social media in recent time, you can’t 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, “the 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.”

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, it’s critical for your brand to also do the same. You really can’t afford to miss out on the massive opportunity to interact and engage with your audience and prospects on social media.

Let’s check out some social media stats:

• According to Newsroom, Facebook had “2.01 billion monthly active users as of June 30, 2017.”
• “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)

• Save

Numbers don’t lie. They show that there are lots of opportunities for you on social media to connect with a massive audience.

I hope you’re already using social media to promote and market your brands. And to help you even further, I’ve 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

It’s one thing to write content for your blog. It’s 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).

• Save

However, you don’t 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. It’s 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 they’ve 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, don’t 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, “adding a photo URL to your tweets can boost retweets by 35%.”

• Save

Similarly, in a blog post titled “Why Content Goes Viral: What analyzing 1 million articles taught us”, Noah Kagan suggested that “having at least one image in your post leads to more Facebook shares.”

• Save

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.

• 20 Awesome Tools for Creating Engaging Visuals for Your Blog & Social Media

I have experimented on posts with and without images in the past, and trust me, it’s 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 won’t.

However, if you make it simple for them (like a couple clicks of the mouse), they’re 100% more likely to share it with their social media friends.

Here’s an example from my blog:

• Save

Most people prefer sharing content when they finish reading, and that’s 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.

It’s that simple.

There are lots of plugins you can use to simplify this process, including Social Warfare, Simple Share Buttons Adder and the one I’m 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 you’re not using a social sharing plugin yet, you’re 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 – if your quality slacks a bit, so will your social share counts.

Here’s 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.

• Save

To understand this more, here’s an excerpt from the post:

• Save

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 there’s 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:

1. At the end of each post, make a statement like “If you enjoyed this post, don’t forget to share.”

• Save

2. 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.
3. 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 – if you have something valuable, I bet they’ll (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 you’re happy with your results so far.

However, a few key changes on your website may convince you to believe that you’ve only just begun scratching the surface.

I’ve given you five actionable on-site changes that can boost your social media traffic. I hope you’ll 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

• Save