You’ve worked hard to create quality content to share with your audience online, but it will take more than just on-air mentions to draw your audience to your site. Social media is an essential piece of your platform, and, when used correctly, can boost user engagement and grow brand awareness. Below you’ll find several great techniques to help you harness the power of social media to drive traffic back to your website.
Establish a Social Media Strategy
The first step in implementing an effective social media plan is to establish and prioritize your goals. Having a desired objective in mind will be helpful when developing your social strategy and identifying your KPI’s. Some objectives to consider are:
- Driving traffic to and increasing page views on your site
- Growing your email database
- Increased entries in an online contest
- Selling tickets to a sponsored event
Once you’ve determined your goals, assign a measurable KPI to each. While everyone wants more likes, shares, and retweets, it’s important to go beyond these and identify metrics that indicate a more tangible impact, such as shares and click-through rates on social posts that feature links to content on your site.
To get started, pick one or two objectives and create a process for posting, reviewing impact, and leveraging that information to improve future posts. Once you’ve established your initial strategy, you can start to broaden your goals.
Optimize Your Content For Each Social Platform
It’s important to recognize that not every social media channel will provide real results. Consider selecting a handful of networks and focusing your efforts there. If you’re not sure where to start, follow your audience. Find the social platforms where they are hanging out online, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and establish a presence in those channels.
Once you’ve determined which social platforms are a good fit for reaching your audience, optimize your content for posting to each. Social media channels are extremely nuanced, each featuring a different character limit and graphic size requirements. Do your homework on the limits for each platform you choose to use, from optimal post times to what type of content performs the best.
While each channel may be different, there are several things you can do to optimize your content regardless of whether you’re using Facebook, Pinterest, or an entirely different platform:
- Use a strong call to action to give your audience a clear and compelling reason to engage with your content.
- Build momentum with a consistent posting schedule.
- Develop a social media content calendar so you can plan posts ahead of time.
- Incorporate variety into your content plan by posting in different media formats (video, image, and text) and on varying topics (re-posts from key influencers, invitations to events, and more).
Expand Your Digital Toolkit
Launching a social strategy can seem a bit daunting when you’re planning consistent content across multiple channels. Thankfully, there are a variety of tools online that can help you stay organized and optimize your potential reach, including:
Social Post Scheduling Services:
Optimization and Metrics Insight Tools:
If you are interested in learning more tips and techniques to help you harness the power of social media, including a closer look at three major social platforms, check out this webinar.
