Learning how to increase social media traffic should be an important part of your business strategy. But here’s the thing, social media is such a mystery sometimes. It can be one of the best tools in a business owner’s toolbox, and sometimes it’s just… lifeless and annoying.

Facebook is constantly changing their algorithms and what gets shown to its 2.5 billion users. Twitter fades in and out of existence. And how do you repost pictures on Instagram? We’re still annoyed you can’t share good stuff from your IG feed, ugh.

Frustrations aside, there is a LOT of utility in what was once just a socializing platform. From paid traffic to building email lists to obtaining the forever elusive “likes,” there are audiences to cultivate and customers to find across most social media platforms.

One of the EASIEST things to do with social media is to increase traffic to your website or blog. These are tried and true techniques that we’ve used for a number of sites with success.

But first, why you should learn how to increase social media traffic

Let’s make one thing clear – increased traffic doesn’t necessarily mean sales for you. So if you’re just increasing traffic to try and sell your Authentic Rainbow Unicorn My Little Pony Plushie, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

An increase in traffic really means an increase in awareness. People will start to notice you exist; people will start to see that they might like what you have to offer.

Usually, learning how to increase social media traffic means increased visibility. Increased visibility means increased affection for your brand. Increased affection for your brand means more followers and more loyalty, which in turn can lead to more sales and more money in your pocket.

The more warmed up your audience is, the more they’re willing to do for you. The more they’re willing to do for you, the more you can ask.

And asking, fam, is how you make a buck online. Don’t fear asking. Because fear leads to anger… wait a second.

Yoda, we love you. You are so smart.

More traffic vs. more quality traffic from social media

One quick note on traffic building.

You can lead a horse to water, but if you don’t lead the right horse to water, he’s just gonna take a drink and peace out on you and you’re right where you started with less water in your bucket.

…. You know, that kind of works. So we’re going to go with it.

So these horses, right. You want good horses. Quality riding horses (ahem). The kind that will take a drink and then carefully consider you with one of their giant eyes and wonder if you have an apple behind your back. That’s the kind of horse that’s going to make up your herd.

So that got a little weird, but the point remains: you want very specific traffic, and you want to make sure that you build your entire platform to attract that traffic. How? Well…

Listen to Laptop Empires podcast episode 109 to hear how Jeff Rose grew his YouTube channel subs from 9k to 150k in just nine months.

Tone-building and tone-consistency

Your ads, posts on social media, blogs, websites, and even your “About Me” page should all feel the same. This will take some refinement, and you’ll have to work on cultivating the right voice to bring in the right audience but it will be WORTH IT because a good audience is one that you can relate to and can relate to you.

Be genuinely helpful

There is so much information online, and people are quick to ignore what isn’t useful information. That means you want helpful, actionable, and shareable information.

Have an email sign up list

Your email list is all yours. You’re not relying on a separate platform or algorithms or shares. This is all for you. Trust us when we say that having an email list is going to really matter.

The point is, you can use social media to grow your email list. Besides sending that list bonus content and offers from time to time, you can use that list to build a highly-targeted audience with Facebook ads. For pennies, might we add?

The power of your email list is one of the most important reasons to learn how to increase social media traffic for your business.

Reach out a lot

Always talk to your audience. The people who like you will stick around and enjoy your company in one way or another, whether that’s through your content or through actual interaction with you.

The people who don’t will jet, and you’ll be left with a much more refined audience. This means you should be answering comments, hanging out in communities of like-minded folks, and offering generally helpful comments across the social media board. More on this later.

3 things to do before learning how to increase social media traffic for your site

Alright, you’re almost ready!

But, wait a second…

Some websites claim that the three things we’re about to discuss are how to increase social media traffic, but we disagree. These are things you should do before trying to drive traffic so you can save yourself from looking like an amateur.

Fill out your information

Seems pretty straight forward, right? It is – but places like Facebook have a MILLION places they store data, and several places for you to put it. Your hours, your prices, your services, your address, offerings, six phone numbers, a partridge in a pear tree…

Here are just a few of the locations you need to fill out entirely. Do yourself a favor and click ALL OF THE BUTTONS in the left-hand column, too. When you’re done there, click on the 3-line button underneath the cover photo. You’re welcome.

Borrowed with love & permission from WordStream

Rinse and repeat across all platforms to satisfy Google and to give your audience a clear, consistent vision of you (and your brand). A confused client doesn’t click.

Ensure your site is easy to understand and completely shareable

To kind of repeat the bit above, you need to make sure that your entire website is based on one thing and one thing only: user experience. User experience is going to be the most amazing thing for your potential clients. One of the easiest ways to do this is just to make sure your content is easy to share.

This can be or include any of the following things:

• Social media share buttons on posts and pictures (for pinning on Pinterest)
• Absorbable and easy-to-read posts
• Video content
• Infographics and interesting facts in those infographics
• Short paragraphs, bullet points, and sub-head information
• Consider click-to-Tweet buttons (check it out below)

Nail your call-to-actions

While your audience is intelligent, they need to be told exactly what to do. So give them obvious clues like:

“Shop Now!”

“Book Now!”

“Learn More!”

“Sign Up!”

These are the ever-present call-to-actions, or CTAs.

You’ll find these a lot on Facebook ads, pages, and business profiles, but they’re present pretty much everywhere (we use them too). You’ll see them in pop-ups on websites, during purchases, even on advertisements for brick-and-mortar companies. They’re marketing bread-and-butter because they really work.

So… you should be using them, and you should be using them well. Check out this lovely graphic from Text Request. You’ll see the most used CTAs and the ones that actually perform the best.

One note on CTAs – make sure you’re using them appropriately. You don’t want to plaster “BUY NOW!!!!” all over your page. Use them when they’re relevant, useful, and helpful. Otherwise, you might just look like a spammer, and people hate spam. We hate spam. You probably do too.

How to increase social media traffic for your business

Now that your pages are looking good, you’ve got some good foundations, and your audience is starting to look your way, it’s time for our Five Big Tips on how to increase social media traffic. Hint: it’s not as difficult as you might think.

Tip 1: Get your copywriting skills up to snuff

Copy is king, and you are its queen.

Or something like that.

Good copywriting is going to be your friend, and it can take a long time to really get a voice down. You can start by just writing and figuring out how you say things. Some of us write the way we speak and some of us entirely change it up, but whatever you do, make sure it’s YOUR voice.

Go ahead and grab a cup of coffee and invest a little time in reading some of the articles on CopyBlogger, starting with this one. You’ll be surprised how fast you can refine a wandering voice, figure out what a bucket brigade is, and start rockin’ this copywriting thing.

Your voice won’t change between social media platforms, but the way you write might. Twitter’s micro-blogging forces you to squeeze more into less which means you’ll have to cultivate the art of copywriting in a Tweet. This will be different from a less constrained Facebook post, or an Instagram post which HAS to be a picture.

Tip 2: Engage your audience with excellent visuals

Visuals are worth their weight in gold, especially as you learn how to increase social media traffic. If you scroll up, you’ll see a number of them in this post alone. Even if you’re writing a bunch and a lot of the information you want to pass on has to be in writing, you can still have some engaging pictures along the way.

What makes for engaging visual content:

• Has a nice thumbnail that makes you want to click (if it’s a video)
• Is pleasant to the eye
• Isn’t too shocking and understands the color wheel
• Is humanized with real people, situations, or quotes
• Doesn’t contain a generic stock photo
• Is helpful or interesting

Tip 3: Don’t be a spammer, but reshare content

This is a big one that Neil Patel talks about a lot and we want to bring it up.

Let’s say you write a piece of evergreen content (read: content that’s good for more than just a season). Why would you only share that piece of content once? You put a lot of work into it, after all! People should have more than one chance to engage with it.

Research shows this is INCREDIBLY effective for bringing in more clicks and getting more engagement:

Since people don’t always like recycled content, however, you’ll have to get a little clever with reusing content.

Make sure you don’t repost it with the same headline. If you’re posting it to IG, use a different picture. If something happens in the news that goes along with a piece of content you’ve written, repost it with that news story attached. Get clever. Read this article.

Tip 4: Use Facebook ads to retarget audiences

This is our favorite one because we know something about it! Or a lot, really. Can you tell how humble we are? #humblebrag

Retargeting audiences can be really simple and cheap at first.

The basics are this: you run an ad. Certain people see that ad. After people see that ad, you can send another ad to that same audience. It’ll look different, maybe have a different tagline or header, but since the audience is the same, they’re more likely to notice you on their feed. Why? Because familiarity matters. The more you’re on their feed, the more you feel like a friend they kind of know.

Once you start building an audience, this actually gets easier because you can simply “copy” that audience from an email list, a previous ad, or your website traffic (using the Facebook Pixel) and you can start reaching out to an audience that already knows who you are with offers like:

• Coupons
• Extra cool awesome exclusive content
• A rehash of what they just read
• A friendly, not stalker-ish message of gratitude
• Special ads that target a person who is just in a different place in the funnel

This audience can be the same audience or a look-a-like audience which just resembles the features of your actual audience (We know, it’s creepy, but roll with it). There is nothing more powerful than retargeting ads when it comes to driving traffic to a website.

Tip 5: Captain Jean-Luc says, “Engage!”

You need to lather, rinse, repeat what you’ve just read today. Some will love you and some will not. But, the more you engage, the more likely it is that you’re going to find people who will follow you on every social media channel, click on everything you post, and pick up what you’re putting down.

Engagement is a free (monetarily) way to get traffic to go where you want it to go, so take every opportunity you can and make it happen.

Final thoughts on how to increase social media traffic

There are just so many ways to be successful with increasing social media traffic that we can’t cover them all here. But, know that increasing social media traffic CAN and WILL increase your visibility, visits, followers and, eventually, the cash you make from your gig. So hop on that pony and ride it off into the sunset,