It’s a quandary that a lot of modern business owners have asked at some point. “I have a decent social media following, but those followers don’t seem to translate into actual visits to my website – what gives?”
Turning every single social follower into a regular visitor to your site may be little more than a pipe dream, but by making your social feeds attractive, interesting and engaging, you can increase your chances of a loyal following.
Let’s get started
- Define your visual brand. Firstly, we need to make your social feeds appear as professional as possible. It’s important to have a strong visual brand identity, and one that carries over between all of your social accounts. Keep your colour schemes and designs for your avatar, header image, and media posts consistent.
- Be aware of the differences between platforms. It’s important to become acutely aware of which types of content work best with which social platforms. Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest are good all-rounders as they’re great spaces for both business and pleasure. Instagram tends to do well for businesses with visual products, but can be inventively used to make any kind of company visually interesting. LinkedIn is of course a much more professional and straight-laced platform.
- Be aware of each platform’s uses and limitations. On a related note, know how different platforms are used and how you and your prospects fit in to that. Become acutely aware of the different types of content that do well on each platform and how they are best used. For example, Twitter isn’t a great place to explain complex ideas because of its 140 character limit – unless you do so in a video. If you own a beauty business, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest would probably be great for you, but you may not get a lot of traction on LinkedIn.
But what to share?
- Social media is quite visual, so use images and video. Graphical elements always attract the eye, so by including a link in an image or video post, you increase the odds of someone seeing the post and clicking the link. Each social media outlet works best with different image sizes, so make sure your images are created to suit the appropriate platform.
- If you can provide a demonstration, do so! If you have a product that you can demonstrate in any way, absolutely do so in an image – or even better – a video. People love to see things in action, and if you find you’re struggling to explain yourself in mere text, a professional video or two may be well worth considering.
- Always aim to be useful and insightful. Image posts that feature an inspiring or helpful quote tend to go down well, so go through your website and PR materials to hunt for short, digestible nuggets of wisdom!
- Ask questions and engage in discussions. An excellent way of engaging with your audience is to start a discussion, or engage in discussions started by others. Ask a question as to how your followers would tackle a relevant industry-specific problem and open it up to debate. You can also run polls on Facebook and Twitter if you want to ask a multiple choice question.
- Make time to be real and engage. Social media is of course, ultimately social. The best way to make a good impression is to be present and engage with people. Thank people for sharing your content when they do so, help people who are asking questions and generally be open to starting and engaging in conversation. Twitter hashtag hours and Facebook Groups can both be incredibly valuable places to network and get your name out there.
It’s situations like these where having a blog on your website really helps. You can signpost people to useful information on your site – and on that topic…
Being contented with content
- Start a blog! In my opinion, most companies should be embracing blogging. It gives you an opportunity to share your wisdom with the world in the form of articles that can be shared on social media and can potentially do double duty as press releases and PR assets.
- Remember to promote your content on social media. When you create a new blog post, always post a link to the new content on social media immediately after it goes live. Continue to post links to your blog posts on social media every so often for as long as the information is still useful.
- Hone in on your clientele. When you’re deciding where and what to share, remember to filter your decision through the lens of where your potential clients will be hanging out and what information they would be looking for.
- Pique people’s interest. When you share a link to a blog post, don’t constantly share the title of the post and then the link – switch up the format regularly. Instead of just the title you can include a useful quote from your blog, ask a related question, and generally try and nurture interest enough and encourage clicks.
- Strike a balance between automation and engagement. You can use a number of awesome scheduling tools (like Hootsuite and RecurPost) and automation platforms (such as Zapier or IFTTT) to help you get your posts out there, but remember that social media is a very interpersonal platform, so make sure you are engaging personally and creating real, tangible connections with other people.
- Don’t forget traffic in the other direction. Remember that though we are looking to drive visitors from social to your site, it’s also important to drive people in the opposite direction too. Implement sharing plugins on to your blog pages to encourage shares on social media; as an example, check out the AddThis sharing icons at the top of this article for an example of what I mean. You can also implement “Click To Tweet”-style quotes in your posts like this one:
- Always analyse! And last but certainly not least we have the topic of analysis. Always analyse when your audience is most active on social media using the platforms’ in built analysis tools like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics. Use that data to know when to post your most popular and useful content. Become aware of the time of day people are engaging most, as well as the topics and post frequencies that seem to work best for you.
Analysing the success of your social media accounts and your website is a potentially huge topic. Join me next time when we’ll travel down the analytical rabbit hole…
Can an agency help?
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As part of our all-in-one digital marketing solutions, Yell’s experts boost the visibility of your business on social media to generate awareness, interest, and leads. Interested? Get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help you!
