Social media is a wonderful inexpensive traffic generator if you don’t waste time on tactics that just don’t work. So, before you waste your time doing things without reason, it’s a good idea to try to sit down and understand what it takes to use social media as a turbo-charged traffic generator.
Imagine a traffic generator that sends you, day after day, inexpensive but loyal and targeted traffic, where all you have to do is be social, engage, and share. Sound like a pipe dream? It’s not. However, if you want to be successful using social media as a traffic generator then it’s important to separate messing around on social media to truly using it as a way to grow your website traffic.
Know Who You Want Visiting Your Website
If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it 1000 times; know your audience. It’s imperative that you learn who your audience is before you even begin trying to attract them to your networks or send them to your website. In the business world, this is called target marketing and if you aren’t using it with your social media efforts, you’re seriously wasting your time.
News flash: People who aren’t in your market don’t want what you’re selling.
So how do you know who you should be enticing to visit your website?
Spy On Them – Follow people who you think are in your audience and observe them. What do they share? What do they like? What do they tell their connections on social media? This is a great way to find out what they read, what they do in their free time, and really, who they are.
Get To Know Them – Get to know them in a more intimate way via engagement on social media. Social media is first and foremost a social thing – a way to connect and communicate using technology.
Find Out What They Want – By following them and “spying” you can find out what they want in many areas of their life. Likely, if you’ve done well selecting audience members to spy on you’ll learn a lot that you can use to build products that solve their issues.
Find Out Who They Know – When you find out who they follow and know, you can use that information to connect with those people that they trust. If influencers are friends with you and share your information, that will make an impact on your audience because it will build trust. To learn more about influencer marketing, read this article by Kissmetrics, The Definitive Guide to Influencer Targeting.
Focus your Social Media content on your target audience.
When you know for sure who you want to visit your website you can ensure that your content and information is focused on that audience. After all, how can you deliver something to your audience that they want if you don’t know who the audience is?
Try to Be Interesting (Hint: It’s about them) – In order to be interesting, share attention-grabbing information that resonates with your audience. You may have observed that the more people talk about themselves, the less their audience listens to them.
Post Images & Video – When you post images, people are a lot more likely to look at it and share it. Images can help make a serious subject less painful, as well as help explain complicated topics in fewer words.
Use Humor – Anytime you can make a point with humor you’ll get attention. If you can turn that attention into clicks, that’s even better. This is why knowing your audience is a priority for your business.
Ask Questions – If you’re not sure what to say to get attention, ask an important question that needs to be answered. Give them some choices and try to give them an incentive to answer, such as an electronic report or business tool.
Be Active in Your Life – This might seem odd, but if you don’t have an interesting life, then you can’t really be that interesting on social media. Get away from the computer and live your life, you’ll be happier, it’ll show and people will be drawn to you.
Show your Results – If you’re promoting something that has an end result post about it. You can use images of yourself or you can use images of your audience who have used the product.
It’s OK to be Imperfect – The truth is no one is perfect. But, there is only one you. You are the only one that can add you to the picture. Therefore, always be yourself because if you’re not, it’ll eventually show.
The more you can turn all these things around to be about your audience, the better. When your audience feels listened to, understood, and thought about they’ll be much more likely to click through and go to your website, sign up for your email lists, and become part of your inner circle.
