The impressive growth of social media sites is certainly difficult to overlook. With Facebook having more than 600 million active users and Twitter with 305 million users, making social media a crucial part of your digital marketing makes absolute sense. Social media offers you an opportunity to interact with your audience and gain credibility for your site.
Let's consider some social media facts before proceeding further:
According to a report by Make Use of, 75% of adults use social media as of January 2016
LinkedIn is considered to be the most effect social media platform for small and medium-sized businesses, followed by Twitter and Facebook
A majority of social media platforms are evenly broken between females and males.
Reddit has proven to be the best social networking sites for large enterprises.
However, integrating social media into your marketing strategy does not always ensure success. There are various ways to leave a strong impression on the social network and it takes time and effort. Moreover, there are numerous factors that contribute to the success of your social media marketing strategies. Just because a particular technique is working for your competitor does not mean it would work for your business too.
However, there are certain things that every business can do to improve social media traffic. If you have the urge to be the best among your competitors, implement eight website changes that are sure to bring out the best in your social media marketing strategy.
1. Integrate social media tracking tools
In order to succeed, you need to know how your marketing strategies are performing in regards to driving traffic to your site.
There are few questions that need to be answered to ensure results-driven social media marketing:
1. How much social media traffic your site has managed to receive?
2. Which platform is driving the most traffic?
3. What kind of content is capturing the attention of the users?
Social media tracking tool enables you to get efficient insights into your field, competitors, and audience. Monitoring tools broaden your horizon and help you in understanding your audience.
Let's picture it this way, if you run a kids store, you would certainly want to target young to middle-aged parents and drive more traffic to your site. Keeping track of your social media efforts lets you target the right audience in the right manner.
2. Make use of Social media sharing plugin
How your visitors are supposed to share your content across social media channels? Do you want them to copy the URL and share it on their wall? Why would they? As a matter of fact, web users are impatient and goal-centric. Unless they are given an easy option to share your content they won't ever bother to do so. Therefore, in the era of social networking sites, just writing and posting content on your site is not enough. You need to make it easier for your visitors to share the content across different networks with a single click of a mouse.
This is where social media sharing plugin comes into play. It adds social media share buttons on your content to make it shareable.
3. Use Visual Content
Well, social networking sites, by nature, are built for visual content and thus, visual content boost engagement in comparison to simple, plain text. Visuals accelerate and improve retention, recollection, and comprehension. Visual content not only powers up your communication but also improves user engagement. With hundreds of thousands of sites available, it is so easy for data to get lost or abandoned. However, if you integrate effective visuals into your content, it is more likely to get noticed by your target audience.
The popularity of visual content has even persuaded Twitter into allowing a post with images which has made it even more convenient for businesses to target their audience on Twitter by adding effective images to their 140 characters of the post and grab their users' attention.
4. Write what your audience wants
If you are serious about your social media marketing then inevitably you are serious about getting your post liked and shared. However, in order to capture the attention of your audience, it is important that you write for them.
One of the biggest mistakes bloggers and webmasters make is to write for every web user and end up losing the right audience. The best way to reach your audience is to write for a particular type of audience by understanding what they are seeking.
5. Design a social media friendly website structure
Well, you probably have heard it for the first time but, yes, your website structure has a direct influence on the number of fans, likes, and shares you get. A majority of times, users either find you from Google search results or social media updates. Having a social-media friendly website structure allows you to fosters users to follow you on social networks and share your valuable information.
There are certain things that you can do to make your site's structure social friendly.
1. Use Facebook open graph – Open graph meta tags can be added to your site to always display the featured image
2. Enable Twitter cards – Adding Twitter cards to your website, you can show additional information regarding products, blog posts and links, which are believed to improve engagement levels on Twitter.
Wrap up:
Using the right social media strategies and techniques won't help you drive the right type of audience unless you make your website a social friendly platform. Driving traffic and conversions from social networking sites need an amalgamation of customizations to your content and certain website structural tweaks abreast paying a close attention to social media statistics to comprehend what type of content is doing well and how you can make the most of it to improve user engagement on social media sites. You can certainly get a considerable stream of potential social media traffic to your site if you get this combination right.