Social Media

6 Practical Tips to Increase Traffic From Facebook

Social media drives now more referral traffic to sites than any other medium.

Regardless of the subject you are blogging about, social media should always be included in you blogs’ marketing strategy.

Why?

Well nowadays, as the power of decision making has completely transferred from brand to the customer – there’s no way we can just sit in our ivory towers and shout out how great our content is.

We cannot push our messages anymore. We have to create magnificent content that will pull people closer to our brand.

Most of all, we have to engage and be in constant dialogue with our readers.

Engaging is what social media is all about. It’s where the target market spends their spare time (and sometimes working time as well) consuming content. They do it constantly and in vast quantities.

That’s why social media as a marketing channel is beyond compare.

I’ve gathered 6 solid tips for you to increase traffic from Facebook. These tips are very practical and can be executed in fast schedule.

Keep reading!

Run a competition

Competitions are a great way to get traffic on your site and furthermore – collect email addresses.

For a successful competition, you will need three components:

  • a social media account
  • a prize that is appealing to the people you’re trying to reach
  • a landing page

Picking the social channel

You can do this on any social channel.

For a food blog Pinterest or Instagram would be the right choice and for a marketing blog Twitter and Facebook would probably do the job.

Remember – there’s no right or wrong when choosing the channel-mix. It’s totally up to you and what you know about your readers behavior.

Selecting the prize

In selecting the prize for the winner, you should always think of something that is appealing to the people you are trying to reach.

If it’s something completely unrelated to your business it will a) attract people who are interested only in the prize, not you and b) produce low-quality traffic and leads.

So if you have a cooking blog the prize could be a kitchen knife. If it’s a marketing blog the winner could get your ebook for free.

People who are trying to win a kitchen knife are probably interested in cooking and well as people aspiring to get their hands on ebook about digital marketing are probably in touch with marketing on some level.

When you write the promotion post you have to remember to:

  • make the copy of you promotion message clear and actionable
  • include an image of the prize!

Creating a landing page

Now that you’ve made them click your post, the next thing you want to happen is them to give you their email addresses.

That is done by creating a killer landing page that is optimized for conversion. Here are few tips:

  • Remove the navigation (so there’s no other escape route for the visitor apart from the form)
  • Use actionable words like “subscribe”, “save”, “learn”…
  • Keep your form relatively short
  • Add share buttons (you probably want people to share this, right?)
  • Include an image of the prize

The email addresses you’ll receive are among your most valuable possession. Use them to promote your new content and/or products and nurture them to your loyal followers!

Use the power of the influencers in sharing your content

The top influencers on your field have probably millions of followers ready to do exactly what they say. Imagine if you could put your content in front of these people?

I think you would even consider paying a buck or two for it? You don’t have to – you can do it for free and it’s super easy.

So how to do this?

Share your post and write for example:

Check out this killer article to make your blog a success in 7 days. Thanks for inspiration  #influencer.

Obviously you have to make sure that this influencer who you are mentioning has done something that has acted as an inspiration for you to write the post you are promoting.

This way people searching posts related to the influencer with # will also see your content.

This is a very powerful technique because the people that see your content are already highly interested in the subject.

Make your content shareable

It’s pretty much a no brainer but still many of us fail in doing this.

Adding share buttons to your site is pretty much like handing a megaphone to everyone who visits your site. If they like the content and find it valuable to themselves, they will shout it out and spread the word across the web.

When people share your content in their own social profiles, it will obviously generate traffic back to your blog.

If you are using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins that allow you to add share buttons to your site  easily with just few clicks.

Create a video

It’s nothing new that the popularity of video as a content form is skyrocketing.

Seemingly overnight, video uploading and viewing have exploded on Facebook, where users now watch 4 billion video streams a day, quadruple what they watched a year ago. (source)

Because you are a blogger, there’s pretty much no idea that you can’t turn into a video. Here are few popular options for doing this:

Option 1: Instead of writing, draw it on a paper or a white board, explain it and tape it.

Option 2: Get in front of the camera and create a tutorial!

Option 3: Review a product in your personal style.

Obviously there are plenty of other options as well, so use your imagination to create best possible video for your target audience.

And remember – it’s not just for the impressions and traffic. It’s also about you engaging with your readers!.

So instead of writing, try creating a video of your expertise and share it!

Add a call-to-action button

In December 2014, Facebook introduced “a new call-to-action feature that will help Pages drive business objectives.” (source)

It allows page owners to add call-to-action buttons on their site, just below their banner image.

There are seven different types of call-to-action options to use:

  • Book Now
  • Contact Us
  • Use App
  • Play Game
  • Shop Now
  • Sign Up
  • Watch Video

Mercedes Benz, for example, uses it to get people to sign-up to their newsletter.

Boost your post reach with Facebook Ads

Although you can grow your blog without making any financial investments on marketing, especially if you’re playing on a highly competitive field, you should probably consider investing few bucks to promote yourself to your target segment.

You can promote your post by pressing “Boost Post” in the lower right corner of the post.

Then select the audience you want to boost your post to.

It sounds weird but have to promote it also to the people who already like your page.

That’s because Facebook made a change to their EdgeRank-algorithm that dropped the reach of organic posts significantly  and thus – if you like a page, it’s not certain you’ll see all their posts on your timeline.

Ok, so apart from the people who like your page you can also target your post to their friends.

The third option is to create a custom audience. You can create it by clicking “edit audience” and define your ideal target audience using their sex, age, interest and location as filtering conditions.

With careful targeting and minor marketing investment you are able to boost your post reach and get quicker and better results than by sticking only with organic posting.

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