Having a simple presence on social media as a business these days is becoming increasingly inadequate. It is so simple now to have several social media accounts that today’s ultra competitive online businesses are using social media growth hacks to connect with customers and drive massive traffic to their sites.
In fact, just 4 years ago in 2014, eMarketer conducted a survey across the U.S. and found that a full 88% of business had some kind of social media presence. We are seeing a moving trend towards businesses having multiple online accounts to connect with people.
Fast forward to October of 2018 and BrandWatch estimates that 91% of all retail brands have at least 2 social media accounts; and regular consumers have an average of 5.54 social media accounts themselves, and spend no less than 116 minutes per day on social media.
Social media offers simple platforms where businesses can interact directly with their customers. This is much more than a superficial interaction however, since it allows them to develop long-term relationships.
The successful use of social media even gives consumers the power to dictate the value of a product. Cultivating the relationship with your customers via social media will drive more traffic to your site, and this in turn will influence a higher ranking on search engines.
For most companies, creating and maintaining a presence on social media has an exceptional advantage: that of generating leads. But let's start from the beginning.
From Social Media Presence to Social Media Growth
In order to effect social media growth into its own powerful tool for lead generation, you must first generate an audience: fans for your Facebook page, followers for your Twitter account and your company page on LinkedIn. These are probably the bare minimum, and having a presence on these three will make your growth much easier to attain.
The more your pages on these social platforms get fans and subscribers, the more your reach increases. And the more your reach increases, the more opportunities you’ll have to generate more leads and profits.
Lead generation and capturing should be at the heart of your social media marketing.
If you want to use social media growth hacks to jump-start your lead generation, you’ll need to implement a development strategy to increase your reach. So help you get started, here are some guaranteed methods that will help you achieve this goal.
Optimize Your Current Social Presence
First, you need to make sure that your presence is optimized. Your profile pages and the "About" pages of your accounts on social media must be complete. Include a clear and concise description of your company, its logo, a call to action (“don’t forget to subscribe!”, etc) and the URL of your website.
News that has been posted on social media now appears in search results, so be sure to optimize your tweets, your posts on Facebook and your new Business on LinkedIn with keywords relevant to your niche. This little growth hack will greatly increase the chances of appearing in the search results of search engines.
Find, follow and build relationships with influencers in your niche.
Use online tools such as Tweet Grader, Twitter Search, and Twellow to identify other Twitter users in your industry. Follow them, participate in discussions and start conversations. You’ll be seen as engaging person, and people will naturally follow you and your business, and be readily influenced by your recommendations.
Also, find and follow bloggers who are influencers and retweet their content. Follow anyone who starts following you. Participate in Twitter chats and hashtag-based conversations such as #FollowFriday (#FF).
Finally, follow some of the people that your subscribers (and the people you already follow) also follow.
Interact with your fans and subscribers
Interacting with real people on social media is the key to actual online success
You’ll need to regularly share informative and inspiring content, but don’t forget to monitor your social presence and be interactive with your fans, followers and subscribers. Ask questions! Be approachable and responsive, and participate in discussions to create a presence that your fans will want to follow.
Generating Traffic with Social Media
Using social platforms to publicize one's website has now become an essential approach to attract as many visitors as possible. It’s no surprise then that ‘shortcuts’, i.e. social media growth hacks, have also become an essential part of driving website traffic.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) represents all the tools and techniques intended to improve the position of a website on search engines, especially the all-important Google. Here are some simple but highly effective social media growth hacks that can complement your SEO efforts.
Add tailor-made traffic funnel links to your social media profiles
All your social media accounts must have some mention of your website. It is essential to craft and stage your profiles to entice followers and prospects to click through to your site. However, be sure to plan out (or funnel) your customers in a well thought out manner. Twitter followers will need their own funnel, as will Facebook followers and LinkedIn prospects.
Remember, you don’t want people to just click your profile link and end up on your main webpage. Unless your main web page is set up as a general funnel, you’ll see much greater buying conversions if you funnel each type of social presence separately.
This is because people behave differently on different social media platforms.
Folks on Twitter expect a certain type of interaction; folks on Facebook fan pages expect another kind of interaction. Tailor your traffic funnels to the type of traffic you are driving.
People have different personas on different social media platforms
Yes, this is more work. But it won’t be frustrating work, since you’ll be setting up tailor made traffic funnels that have a much higher ROI for years to come.
Button-Up!
The sharing buttons for your social platforms absolutely need to be present on your website or blog. The main sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter will get the most shares, provided of course that you have already opened an account and have a professional page to show people.
A single click on these sharing buttons by a reader could potentially show your web page to hundreds or even thousands of internet users, themselves also likely to share your information.
This is the sheer viral strength of how a simple little sharing button on your site can generate a large number of visitors who did not know your site beforehand. Add at least the Facebook “like” button and the Twitter button, even if you have not invested yourself in the social microblogging media.
Use social share buttons to boost your other publications
The sharing buttons for your social accounts can also be repositioned to the bottom of your publications to allow and facilitate the sharing of your articles, blog posts or reports, to highlight special deals, related offers, or even upcoming webinars and trainings that you have planned.
A very powerful method here is to create an Infographic that features one of your popular blog posts, then share this on Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. Now, if your infographic is well received, you’ll enjoy free traffic to your blog from those social platforms, possibly for years to come as people share and re-share your infographic featuring your blog post.
Similarly, search engines are fond of the most-read articles and are now technically able to take into account the most popular of your content that is being shared in social circles.
This is what is known as “social signals”, and when a search engine finds that your content is being shared in great numbers on social platforms, that content begins to move up the search engine results pages with it’s own authority.
Cross-promotion: the Ultimate Social Media Growth Hack
As mentioned above, businesses and people now use on average five to six different social media platforms every day. They are also spending nearly two full hours of their day on social media.
Leverage social media by cross promoting your content
Use this knowledge to your advantage by ensuring that all your social media content cross promotes to other platforms.
What this means is:
- Make sure your YouTube videos have a call-to-action to your Facebook Fan Page
- Feature your YouTube channel on your Facebook Fan Page
- Share your Instagram photos on Twitter and Pinterest
- Create a special “Twitter followers only” download gift for followers who also subscribe to your blog
The possibilities are nearly endless. And the more you can keep your fans and followers engaged, the greater the likelihood that they’ll also buy from you.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://trafficelements.com/2019/08/26/social-media-growth-hacks-for-powerful-traffic-generation/
Hey Lindley,
Since you're a lover of social media marketing, did you try the social media analyzer from Steem Hunt? That one which tells you how many big macs a sponsored post of yours makes?
Good stuff.
Cheers
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