How to Use Social Media to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

You must develop an effective strategy to harness the power of the online socializing platforms.

Social Media for bloggers is all about striking a balance between the fun side and effort side for getting maximum benefits. On the fun part, you can use social networking to connect with your audience on a personal level, to know them their preferences and to build a community. But on the effort part – basically, technical complexity, you must develop an effective strategy to harness the power of the online socializing platforms.

Regardless of it being fun for you or a technical maze, social networking offers a wide array of benefits especially when you start blogging. One such advantage of social media is that it helps in boosting traffic to your blog.+

How?

Well, we all know that social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. are an excellent way to socialize these days and connect with new and like-minded people. But is it an excellent place to market your blog and drive traffic to your website?

Definitely, yes.

According to Statista, there are more than 2 billion users across the globe in 2016. Facebook alone had 1.86 billion active monthly users in 2016. That’s right, 1.86 billion users engaged in a month! Now, it’s a no-brainer that there are plenty of active users to reach out and market your blog. And surely, the right amount of exposure.

Who knew a couple of social media post hold the potential to provide that kind of exposure to your blog

Here, a question might pop up in your mind - if social media is easy and effective, why every other blogger is not getting the benefits of boost the traffic flow? Well, because most bloggers fail to use this powerful tool to its full potential. Marketing on social platforms requires both an understanding of such platforms and the use of some coherent techniques to see the results you desire.

To be honest, with the right social media strategy, you can achieve magnified exposure to the target audience without devoting too much of time and resources to it. Do you want to learn social media blogging tips that can enhance the reachability of your blog? Then, let’s get down with it.

Choose the Right Platforms for Promoting Blogs

What is the big deal about choosing the right social networks? If you think that selecting all the popular social media platforms and being active there will help your blog, you cannot be more wrong.

There are a vast number of social networks. While there might be tons of blog promoting potential in each one, it might not be reasonable. Using all of them together is both a waste of your time and resources.

Thus, it is a better strategy to choose a couple of social media platforms and focus on them especially, when you are working with a goal to increase blog traffic. Now, the question arises - how to choose the right social networks that go well with your blog promotion strategy? Here are some tips to help you with that:

Analyze Your Target Audience & Your Blog

If you analyze your blog, you will be able to identify social networks that suit your style, theme, and niche. Similarly, try to explain you’re your audience to identify their online socializing activities. Some of your readers use only a few social networks.

Traffic Driving Potential

While choosing social networking sites for your blog, you need to select the ones that have a good number of active users and has the potential to send readers to your blog. Some online networking sites with high traffic potential include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This list will vary depending on your target audience. Besides you can contact digital marketing companies such as Shout Digital to drive traffic on your website.

Create a Good Social Media Profile

You're social media profile is your online face. After all, that is the first thing your audience will see. Invest some time and effort in writing your Facebook About, Twitter bio, LinkedIn About/company page, Instagram bio, etc. Fill all the information in your profile to help your visitors know more about you and also to build their trust.

Be Active When Your Audience is Active

If you are trying to drive traffic from social media, you need to interact with your audience and attract them to your blog. One of the right ways of doing so is posting your content when your target audience is online. When you post at other times, you will only contribute to increasing your bounce rate which is not good news for your blog.

Visually Appealing Social Shares

Social media users can scroll down the content. If your content is not exciting enough, you followers will scroll it down and will avoid going to your blog. Therefore, you will have to catch their attention from the very first sight. Visual content such as photos, videos, animations, infographics, GIFs, Graphs, etc. enhances the potential of clicks by 40%.

Make Content Sharing Easier

I know you have jumped into sharing your blog content on your social media handles. But this marketing is all about building your own community/network. You can then market to them again and again. Building a community and marketing to them is not a piece of cake.

But you can simplify and accelerate it using automation. While creating new blog posts, make sure you don’t miss out sharing them your social profiles. To ensure you are socially updated, use automatic sharing tools or plug-ins to help you.

Automate content sharing using social media tabs on your blog to allow your readers to share your content easily over their social media profiles.

Reposting Your Content

So, you posted your content on your social media after creating it. But that is not it. You can repost your blogs to get the most out of your content. Interestingly, most bloggers avoid sharing their content more than once. They think that in the second round the returns will diminish. That is, however, just a myth as it is often hard to argue with results.

Sharing your content multiple times on social networking sites helps in triggering strong reactions from audiences. And guess who’s complaining? No one. Remember, some of your social sharing goes unnoticed. People have different times to be online on social platforms. By posting multiple times, you can ensure that your updates do not go unnoticed.

But isn’t that spamming? No. Not unless you are posting it every hour. Then, it’s both spamming and irritating.

You can re-post your old posts and share your new posts multiple times as long as you follow a strategy. Here are a few tips to share your content on social media more than once without spamming.

Develop a Sharing Strategy

If you are planning to share your content multiple times, you must develop a reposting strategy to guide you. Develop a simple schedule after analyzing your target audience. Analyzing your audience will give you an idea of how often you should post and which of your older content you should re-post.

Make Each Post Unique

Now, you are posting the same content again. How can you post unique? Well, you can. And you must. A little difference between spamming and reposting is – the uniqueness of post. Mostly, we share blog tile, a few relevant hashtags, and a link while posting for the first time. It is excellent for your first post. But if you do it, again and again, your posts will become monotonous.

Go a little creative while writing your posts to catch the attention of your audience for the second or third time. Optimize your social message text and image for each network. Avoid posting the same message and vision in all of your social media platforms.

Analyze Performance

Keep a close eye on how each social share performs. Try to increase and decrease your reposting according to the feedback you receive from your followers.

If you put sincere efforts in reposting, you can make your content go viral. An extensive reposting strategy helps in creating a blog post viral. Reposting is the reason behind most blogs going viral long after original posting.

Engage with Your Audience Consistently

While you are posting and reposting on your social networks, do not overlook their socializing aspect. Try to engage directly with your audience. Chat with them. Reply to their comments. Answer their questions. All this will help you build a loyal community of followers.

Bonus Tips

• Now that we have discusses some core tactics of using social media to drive traffic, let’s talk about some tips that you can use on the go.
• Link your social media platforms to your blog.
• Use optimized call-to-actions in your social media shares to increase audience engagement.
• Hashtags help in generating more exposure for your postings. Use hashtags effectively and correctly.
• Search and join relevant groups and communities in your niche.
• Start a competition with a prize of free giveaways on your Facebook. Ask your followers to like, tag, share, and comment to participate in a competition to win free stuff.
• Use Facebook Like Popup Box to increase your Facebook post likes and blog traffic.
• Try to build a personalized connection with your readers by interacting with your readers. Take note of what they want you to write, like their comments, answer their queries, etc.
• Content is the king. Try to create high-quality and relevant content. The users reciprocate better if your content is good.
• If you have incorporated Twitter into your Social Media strategy, follow all the relevant people in your niche. Retweet the content posted by them along with information snippets relevant to your audience.
• Tweet your blog multiple times. Generally, reposting four times is considered ideal. But you must try and test to find your perfect number or reposting.
• Post your content on Reddit. You must also convert your popular content into link-friendly PDFs. Upload these PDFs on Slideshare and Scribd for better exposure. Don’t forget to embed links to your website.
• List and advertise your blog on directories & listing websites. Google Places, Bing Places, Yahoo! Local The listing, and other Directories are an excellent way to drive traffic to your site.
• SEO optimizes your blog to maximize the benefits of your Social Media Strategy. You must ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Most of your users use social media apps and will open links on mobile devices. Ensure your website loads quickly and is responsive to the mobile devices used by your readers. Create XML sitemaps and submit it to Google Webmasters and Bing Webmasters.
• Try out social media paid advertisements to boost your website traffic if your funds permit.

The above-mentioned social media tactics will help you magnify the flow of traffic to your website. You will have to try out different tips and tricks and check what works for you. The audience preference keeps changing and therefore, you will have to make a continuous effort in upgrading your strategy from time to time.

Sharing your blog content on various social media platforms is nothing less of an art. And just like any other creative process - there are no set rules. There is no right way or wrong way. You must use analytics to determine the effectiveness of the techniques you use.

Hope, this the article helps you add a couple of tips and tricks to your social media strategy.

Which the tactic worked best for you? What social media tricks do you use to increase your blog’s traffic? Did I miss out on any trick? Do let me know in the comment section. Don’t forget to share this article on your social media, if enjoyed reading it.

Sally is an enthusiastic blogger and marketing manager. She maintains keen interest in progress and development in the marketing and business space.