8January 2023
Many online entrepreneurs fail to utilize social media to promote their products. When social media is used correctly, it can drive traffic to your website, increase brand engagement, awareness, and lead generation.
Today I’ll cover some of the proven ways to get free website traffic from social media, as well as the mistakes to avoid.
Start by Optimizing Your Profiles
Your social media profiles have a role to play when it comes to brand recognition and building. The right social media profile can drive traffic to your site. Therefore, there is a need to optimize your social media profiles.
You should ensure the social media profiles are optimized with relevant keywords. Moreover, you should not miss crucial information when filling in profile details.
Engage Your Audience
The good thing about social media is that it helps you to connect with the target audience directly. As a result, you can interact with the audience, improve customer experience, and get feedback.
Make sure you engage with your audience regularly. In this way, you can boost traffic to your website. Also, you can take into account the opinions of your target audience in your content.
Remember social media is not a one-way communication platform. Rather, it is a two-way platform. This means you should not ignore your audience. Make sure you keep it engaged.
Post Regularly
As a social media marketer, you want to build a list of loyal followers. You can achieve this by posting regularly. There are several factors to guide you when posting. These include your target audience, content, profile bios, hashtags, and time zone.
Keep checking what other brands are doing. If your competitors are posting regularly, you should also do the same.
Create Viral Content
Viral content is common with social media. If you find content that is enticing, relatable to your audience, and unique, you can post it to acquire more traffic. Viral content can help you increase website traffic with minimal effort.
You should note that not all posts will become viral. Ideally, viral content should make others share and spread it to reach more people. Some examples of viral content include memes and short videos.
Share Visual Content
Visual content will get more shares and likes than ordinary content. You should invest your time and resources in creating visuals. Your visuals should be unique to attract your audience. Also, you should share your visual content with your target audience.
The good thing about visual content is that it increases social media visibility. Make sure you use visuals that tell stories and deliver information.
Research Your Competitors
The right marketing strategy must take into account what your competitors are doing. There are various online tools you can leverage to get performance and insights. Other than analyzing traffic, you can gather performance metrics and ideas.
Before you start posting and sharing your content, you should analyze the performance of your competitors. This will help you come up with strategies to beat them.
Friend Potential JV Partners
Every day you should send at least 5 friend requests to marketers in your niche who are on Facebook. These marketers will be your future joint-venture partners.
As your list of friends grows, you’ll be able to reach out to them via instant message whenever you launch a new product or service, and send them to your JV page for details.
Avoid Over Promoting Your Products
Most businesses post only about their services and products. This is likely to bore your audience. Instead, you should make your posts useful and interesting for them. Remember your aim is to retain followers and then convert them into potential customers.
Partner with Social Media Influencers
Social media influencers have created a huge impact in the digital space. Ideally, they are internet celebrities. You can benefit from their immense popularity and followers count on social media.
These celebrities are known to influence how their followers think. Usually, they have a huge network of followers and fans through their social media accounts, blogs, YouTube, and more.
You do not have to work with every influencer out there. Instead, find one with whom your target audience resonates. The idea is to find an influencer who can endorse your products and brand.
Measure Results
There are many tools you can use to measure your results. You should keep a record of visitors from the social network and then analyze its performance. This will help you understand the best social media networks suitable for your business.
There are also tools you can use to publish or schedule your social media posts. You should always keep monitoring the performance of your content across different social media platforms.
Participate in Groups
It is advisable to join several active community groups. Look for groups with people you share the same interests. Those are the groups that can help you drive traffic to your website.
Mistakes to Avoid
Social media marketing offers a huge potential to businesses when it is done right. It can help you grow your brand, improve your revenue, and grow your customer base.
However, if you are making certain social media mistakes, then your efforts can be futile. These are the common social media mistakes you must avoid.
Dismissing Social Media Marketing Altogether
Some marketers believe social media is not effective for their industry or demographic. This is attributed to the misconception that social media is only for tech-savvy teenagers. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Social media is now being used by all classes of people. If you have an effective social media marketing strategy, you can beat your competition hands down.
Not Having a Plan
No matter what you are doing, without a plan, you are likely to fail. This is also the case with social media marketing. Many marketers fall into this trap.
You need to approach social media the same way you do planning for other product promotional campaigns. Make sure there are specific goals, a budget, and a solid plan. The plan will outline what you want to achieve.
Failure to Network
Social media is not only about sharing posts. Having thousands of followers who are not your target market will have no impact on your results.
Instead, you should attract and engage people who have the same interests and views as yours. This will help you build and expand your network. In this way, you can increase the exposure of your content to millions of people.
Opening Too Many Accounts
Many marketers make the mistake of opening too many accounts on every social media network. Managing these accounts requires a lot of resources. It stretches the marketing budget and produces little results.
If you have a small budget, you should focus on the top social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. It is advisable to allocate more resources to the social network with promising results.
Being Too Promotional
Customers are easily turned off by overly promotional marketing campaigns. Although you need to highlight your services and products, you should find a balance between value and promotional content.
It is advisable to build online relationships with your audience. As a result, you will engage them more.
Using Low-Quality Visuals
Studies have shown that customers move past social media posts with low-quality images or videos. Remember you have a few seconds to catch the attention of the target audience. Thus, you cannot afford to post bad visuals.
Graphics, images, and videos ought to be part of your strategy. Consider hiring an expert who specializes in creating visual content.
Not Responding to Customers
Recent studies have shown that customers are likely to buy your products if you respond to their questions on social media. Also, you are likely to build loyalty and some customers can share their positive experiences on their profiles.
You should make it imperative to respond to questions faster. As you know, customers are naturally impatient. If you delay answering them, they can lose confidence in your brand. You can use social monitoring tools to know when people have asked questions about your brand.
Not Tracking Your Performance
The good thing about social media marketing is that you can track your performance. When you track your results, you can make appropriate strategic changes in your target audience and campaigns.
For instance, if there is a non-performing ad, you can stop it. This will save you the money you can spend on other performing ads.
Remember it takes time and a lot of testing to get the desired results. Therefore, keep tracking and optimizing your social media campaigns.
Treating All Social Media Networks as Same
This is another social media marketing mistake to avoid. A lot of businesses post the same content on all their social platforms. Ideally, they copy-paste the same content.
Each social media network is unique in several ways. Also, they vary in terms of marketing tools, features, behaviors, interests, and demographics. You should take into account your marketing strategies and updates for social media networks.
Buying Followers
Buying social media followers is not even a mistake, it is a sin. Many brands have been caught buying followers or participating in exchange programs. Unfortunately, this does not bring any meaningful results. It only soothes the brand’s ego. Some brands have been banned forever for engaging in this activity.
If you want to chat about improving your social media marketing or you need help with something else, go to ConnectWithWalt.com and click the orange “Let’s Meet” button to set up a short conversation.