How Social Media Can Increase Your Website Traffic

If you’ve ever asked yourself or members of your team, ‘How can we get more website visitors?,’ you’re not alone. 

In fact, increasing website traffic is often a main problem. And one of your solutions can be social media.

Social media (if done right) has the ability to be a major source of traffic (and leads) to your website. Here’s some of the things you can do to achieve that:

3 Ways Social Media Can Increase Your Website Traffic

1. Post Visual Content

Whether you want to believe it or not, when something is visually pleasing you pay more attention to it. The same goes for social media posts.

But hey, you don’t have to take my word for it. Here are some statistics:

1. 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging (38%). (Source)
   
2. 74% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, ahead of blogs (68%) and videos (60%). (Source)
   
3. When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later. (Source)
   
4. 51% of B2B marketers prioritized creating visual content assets in 2016. (Source)
5. By 2017, video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic. (Source)
6. 4X as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it. (Source)

The take-away seems pretty obvious here…if you’re not posting visual content on social media, it’s time to start.

2. Post Consistently

Consistency is the key to not only growing your audience, but also providing value to your current audience. The more consistent you are with your posting, the more likely you’ll be seen.

And once your social media traffic begins to grow, don’t stop or slow down your posting.

Posting daily to your social media channels seems like a tedious and time-consuming task, but it’s not with a little planning.

We suggest using a social media content calendar to plan and schedule your posts in advance.

Remember, keeping a daily publishing schedule is crucial to effectively increasing your social media traffic (ultimately your website traffic).

3. Research Your Competitors

Finding out what and how well your competitors are doing is probably already a component of marketing strategy. It should also be a part of your social strategy.

HubSpot allows you to perform a competitive analysis. The analysis provides information such as:

• Social media accounts
• Social media fans
• Marketing grade
• Traffic rank
• Linking domains
• mozRank

If you don’t have Hubspot, no problem. You can still research your competition’s social media. By looking through their social media channels, you’ll be able to learn things such as:

• Days and times to post
• Which social channels are the most engaging
• How often your competition answers their fans
• And (most importantly) what types of content are published

Just a little bit of digging around can provide you with a lot of insight to your competition and industry, so you can drive engagement and traffic to your social channels and your website.  

Increasing your website traffic is like a puzzle. It’s like putting together a lot of little pieces, including social media. Check out our Five Basic Ways to Increase Website Traffic to find more of your puzzle pieces!