What are the everyday things every business desires? Probably more customers, more sales, more revenue, more profits.

These customers often come to the website and then get converted into buyers since that’s the primary source of business information. This makes website traffic the first thing every business desires.

From strategizing SEO to PPC campaigns, increasing website traffic is a goal for every brand irrespective of their domain. They spend loads of time trying to hire the right person or frame the right strategy to drive more visitors.

Another step brands are taking to create awareness and communicate with the audience is to maintain a social media presence – a means to represent the brand as more than just a product or service provider.

But we were talking about website traffic. Why are we suddenly shifting to social media?

It’s because social media can drive up to 200% more traffic to your website, and we will help you do it!

71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are more likely to recommend the brand to family and friends.

With everyone spending time on their phones all day long, scrolling through social media, and consuming so much content, it’s easy to interrupt and divert their attention to your website. However, to achieve the desired results, you need to follow a systematic approach.

Let’s see how you can do it following this step-by-step guide to increase your scale graph for website traffic using social media.

Content table

Step 1: Link your social media to Google Analytics

Step 2: Identify the right social media channels for your brand

Step 3: Optimize your social media profiles

Step 4: Keep an eye on your competitors

Step 5: Create share-worthy content 

Step 6: Up your content distribution and promotion game

Step 7: Offer free resources and deals

Step 8: Engage with your audience directly

Step 9: Connect with influencers

Step 10: Analyze your efforts

Step 1: Link your social media to Google Analytics

Before you begin optimizing your social media profiles for driving traffic to your website, you need to set an analyzing system in place. This is important because, without this, you won’t be able to distinguish the traffic redirected to your website through social media channels and that from other sources.

Here’s what you can analyze after setting up an analytics system in place:

• Which social media platforms are sending you the most traffic and which ones you need to pay more attention to.
• The time spent on the website by your social media visitors will tell you how engaged they are if you’re targeting the right audience and if they like your content.
• You can compare new visitors and returning visitors to see if your social media visitors are coming back to the website. If not, you can revise your social media strategy to boost its effectiveness.

So, how can you set this up?

1. Log in to your Google Analytics page.
2. Open admin and click on goals.
3. Click on ‘+new goal.’ 
4. Go to ‘goal setup’ and add a template, preferably the ‘custom template.’
5. Under ‘goal description,’ add your social media goal, such as to get email sign-ups.
6. Under ‘goal details,’ select the landing page for which you want to record this data. Here, you need to fill in the URL of your landing page without the domain name.

And voila!

Now, whichever way you use your social media strategy to direct traffic to your website, it will start analyzing it for the landing page you selected and the goal you chose.

Now, let’s begin with our social media game!

Step 2: Identify the right social media channels for your brand

Now that you have an analyzing system in place tracking every parameter, you need to work your social media game. However, before doing that, you need to ensure you’re leveraging the right channels.

There are many social media platforms, but what’s best for you is determined by your brand objectives and goals.

If you’re a consumer- or product-based company, a B2C, business-to-consumer channel like Instagram and Facebook might be right for you. On the other hand, if you serve businesses and address a professional audience, then, a B2B, business-to-business channel like LinkedIn would be more suitable.

Now, if your brand needs to maintain a visual presence, then platforms like YouTube and Pinterest may be a good fit for you.

In this infographic, Remic points out the main features and demographics of some popular social media channels. These are generic findings and can be looked at to take an idea about the platforms most suitable for your brand.

But why do you need to choose your social media channels?

Because focusing on all the channels together or on the wrong one for your brand may cause more harm than good because you won’t be serving your target audience.

You need to target someone and not everyone. And to do this, you need to identify the right platform, so your efforts are backed by results,  in this case, increased traffic to your website.

Here are some things to consider while choosing your social media platforms:

1. Who is your target audience?

Research says that if you have a preconceived and general understanding of the demographic and marketing you’re catering to, it provides extra leverage in establishing a relationship with them.

To sufficiently understand your audience, do a detailed analysis. See what they do, where they live, the demographics, their buying capacity, how much time they spend on their phones, and more. You can even use a tool to understand your website visitors. The best way to understand your audience is by looking at the ones visiting your website.

After doing this research, create a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer derived from your target audience research. With this, you will understand your audience much better and take the necessary steps accordingly.

You can use Hubspot buyer persona templates to draft one for your brand and let that guide your strategy.

2. Which platforms do they use the most?

Your target audience is most likely to use one or two platforms more than the others. Those one or two platforms they use and visit every day are your go-to platforms. Why?

Because that’s where your target audience hangs out, and this is where you can attract them with your content and social media campaigns to make them want to visit the website and eventually convert into paying customers.

3. What kind of content are you trying to produce?

Content is the center of all social media activities. To meet your goal of increasing website traffic, you need to create stellar content that adds value to the target audience.

But before you can create content, you need to decide what kind of content you’re planning and if it is suitable for the platform you’re choosing.

For example, visual content works better on Instagram, but text content works well on Facebook.

Your content goals also need to align with your social media goals.

4. What is your brand’s story?

How do you wish to tell your brand’s story? Through videos, or written content or images? These aspects also need to be considered while choosing a social media platform for yourself.

Your brand story matters a lot because it humanizes your brand and aims to start a conversation with your target audience to engage with them. So, framing your brand’s story and deciding how you will communicate also plays a significant role.

5. How will social media support and grow your website?

Even though you have a social media plan in mind, you need to have an idea about what you expect from social media and how it can contribute to growing your website.

Is it through giveaways, content creation, gated content, collaborations, or interviews?

This will help you decide which platform matches best with your overall goals.

These questions can be answered by conducting market research of your target audience and understanding their behavior. This is because, ultimately, your audience will visit the website.

The social media platform you decide as a part of this objective should align with your brand’s personality and reflect what you uphold.

Once you have your social media channels in place, you can start taking steps towards the ultimate objective of increasing website traffic.

Step 3: Optimize your social media profiles

Optimizing your social media profiles is as important as optimizing your website’s SEO.

Social media is a great brand building and recognition tool, but it will only reap good results if you genuinely invest time, making it the absolute best.

On social media, many other brands/individuals are doing the same thing as you, so how do you stand out? By turning your business into a brand and focusing on branding.

Here’s a checklist for you to keep in mind while optimizing your social media profiles:

1. Profile and cover picture

You don’t have a cover picture on Instagram, but on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you do. And to keep the branding consistent, you must have the same profile and cover picture across your social media profiles.

Here, Mad Over Marketing (M.O.M), an advertising and marketing agency, has the same profile and cover picture on both LinkedIn and Twitter.

Why? Because this helps your customers and audience recognize your brand and its posts the minute they come across it.

Ensure both of these reflect the brand’s personality because they create a first impression on the user, which cannot be missed!

2. Complete your profile bio and contact details

Your social media bio needs to define what you do and why you do it. It’s best if it conveys the message in a tagline, followed by a call-to-action.

Since we aim to drive traffic to the website, the CTA should be the website URL along with a text which says,

‘Need help with XYZ? Visit our website,’ or anything which goes along your brand guidelines.

Make sure the website URL is visible on all your social media profiles.

Since you can’t write a hefty article on yourself in the bio, keep it short and crisp with only the necessary information. Don’t forget to add your main keywords in the bio, which helps in better SEO ranking.

The contact details can include your location and email address.

On Twitter, Buy me a Coffee has a crisp bio that tells the users what they do and the next step they should take, ‘create a page,’ they further go on to say, it only takes 2 minutes to enroll a bit of humor too.

3. Choose themes and a color palette for your feed

One thing contributing to your presence on social media is having a branded feed made along with your brand’s personality.

This includes choosing a color palette as per your brand’s logo and using that to guide your posts’ design on the platform.

Remember, great content hooks the audience, but great design compels them to keep visiting your profile and reading your posts. This is especially true now more than ever when visual content rules!

The idea of a branded feed is to condition your audience to your colors, such that whenever they see a post, story, video, or ad which has a palette and design unique to you, they will be able to recognize you without seeing the brand name. A consistent feed aesthetic helps to define your brand voice and reputation better. That’s how vital branding is.

On Instagram, SquareAcademy maintains a joyful theme of pink and contrasting colors keeping everything consistent from the design layout to the font in every post that perfectly defines their brand.

Once you have successfully optimized and completed your social media profiles, it’s time to research.

Step 4: Keep an eye on your competitors

A great marketing strategy also consists of keeping an eye on your competitors and monitoring their success. You can use several social media tools for analyzing your competitor’s social traffic and top posts.

You don’t have to hire a detective to keep an eye on them, but a simple analysis and notes here and there might save you time researching your target audience and contemplating how you can keep them engaged enough to visit your website.

The idea is not to replicate their strategy but to take inspiration from it and create your strategy. If you have the same target audience as your competitor, you’ll get an idea about:

• The type of content they create
• How they engage with their audience
• How the audience responds to their content
• How they divert traffic to their website

This competitor analysis template by Popsters is an excellent example of how you can analyze your social media competition. Or consider making a template along the same lines by tweaking elements as per your requirement.

This can help you in many ways, including not making the mistakes they make and identifying the gaps and filling them with your strategy.

Everyone wants to be the best option for the solution they provide, but there is always a gap, a new and innovative idea that your competitor is not doing but can make a world of difference for your brand.

You need to observe, analyze, and understand their strategy to draft your own by filling in their gaps.

Step 5: Create and post share-worthy content

If you want to drive traffic to your website through social media, you need users to visit your profile, because that’s where the website link is right?

But would they visit your website if you’re just promoting your website content to gain more visitors? No, they won’t.

Let’s be real; every person is on social media to hang out. They want to be up to date with trends and participate in it by sharing their pictures and content. This means that the key to getting people to your profile is to create share-worthy content that adds value to your audience.

Here are some things you should consider while creating and posting content:

1. Type of content

Ideally, visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared than any other piece of content but with the continually evolving social media features, let’s explore our options:

• Carousels

Carousels perform well on social media if they provide valuable information on a particular topic given the headline is strong and enticing. An idea here could be to repurpose your blogs into carousels and redirect the audience to the blog for more information by sharing the link.

However, this can be done for selective blogs and not for each one, since you don’t want to promote your website blatantly.

Rest, base your carousels on your target audience’s pain points for the best response.

• Videos

Long-form videos for Youtube and short-form videos for Instagram work because they are easier to consume and significantly divert attention.

Here again, your blogs can be converted into videos or vlogs to garner more reach.

Tips and tricks, tutorials, how-to videos, and personal experiences are examples of putting video content in front of the audience to establish a one-to-one connection.

Influencer Gary Vaynerchuk creates IGTV videos to educate the audience about relevant topics and snippets from his speaking gigs, which are widely loved and appreciated.

• Infographic

Infographics present valuable information supported by visuals to keep the user engaged.

They can be used as an outline for a blog post embedded in the blog and shared on social media. This can further be linked to the blog post, thus providing even more value to the audience.

Humour is a great way to keep your audience engaged, and if you’re making memes about topics surrounding your brand, the users may want to re-share it thus garnering more people on your profile, and eventually the website.

You can also use stories on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to offer sneak peeks into your upcoming blogs or link to an interview hosted on your website.

The more valuable content you share, the more likely are people to be curious about what you do, and when they do, they will visit your website. So, focus on creating share-worthy and valuable content that clicks with the audience while redirecting them to your website in a not so obvious manner.

Netflix made a meme about one of their shows relating it to the current situation of 2020. Since the audience could relate to it, the post was widely shared.

2.Posting time

Once you’ve created excellent content, you need to post it. But posting it randomly at any time in the week is not going to cut it, you need to see when your audience is most active- time and days both!

The posting time differs for every platform, for example, according to Hootsuite, the best time to post on Facebook is 12 pm-3 pm on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday while 12 pm-1 pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Even though these are generic calculations, you can always experiment and see which posts garner more engagement at what time to work out a posting schedule.

Instagram’s in-built analytics tell you when your audience is most active, so you can even follow those.

It’s important to post when your audience is active because they’re free, scrolling through social media, and are ready to be interrupted by your content. So, you can steal their attention, make them curious, and entice them to visit your website- all through quality content and active posting time.

3. Social media content calendar

Now that you have a content creation process in place, and the posting time, it’s time to create a content calendar.

Why is this important?

You can’t just randomly post whenever you want because, with social media, consistency is vital. If you’re posting 3 times a week, it’s much efficient if you have a schedule and system that keeps the content prepared well in advance while maintaining the agility to tweak a few changes.

You can make a Trello board or a Google sheet with the following categories:

• Content topic
• Content format
• Writer
• Designer
• Platform to be published on
• Day and time of publishing
• Status (to do, pending, in review, published)

This will give your team a heads up of the schedule and make the process swift.

You can make a similar board for free using Monday to make your calendar. Ensure that you make the calendar in a place where it’s easy to collaborate with your team members so all of them can work on it together.

4. Hashtag strategy

Hashtags are an essential part of social media because they segment the content as per their keywords. People often search for content using relevant hashtags, so it’s essential to use hashtags pertinent to your content to increase its reach.

Many tools like Later and Hashtagify tell you the relevant hashtags as per your content or industry, so you use only those that cater to your target audience and avoid spammy/blocked hashtags.

5. Call-to-action buttons

Social media is a communication and engagement platform more than a content creation platform, and so, it’s important to tell your audience what to do next.

These CTAs should be placed in your stories, videos, carousels, bio, comments, or posts.

Here are a few examples of CTAs which will expand your social media reach and website traffic:

• Read more, link in bio
• Tag a friend who might find this useful
• What are your views on this? Comment below
• Do you have more to add? Best comment gets pinned
• Share this, tag us in your stories for a prize
• Visit our blog to read similar content
• Follow our hashtag to stay updated

Monk Entertainment asks its audience to check out their brand work, a great CTA, to redirect the audience to another brand page.

These calls to actions are essential because, without them, you’ll lose your audience.

Step 6: Up your content distribution and promotion game

Creating great content alone is not enough to generate traffic to the website and get visitors to engage with you. It requires multiple touchpoints before the user finally takes action. For this, a good content distribution and promotion strategy work best.

Research says that the 1st one hour of posting any content on your social media is crucial because it determines if your content will break through the noise of excessive content online or saturate like the others.

Let’s see how you can do this:

1. Share your posts more than once

You should share your content multiple times because some of your followers may be in different time zones, and if you re-share, say, after a week of first posting it, you may have garnered more followers.

Re-sharing expands the scope of reach and introduces it to new followers, thus increasing the traffic.

2. Cross-promote

If you’re using 2 platforms, say Facebook and Instagram, consider linking your posts across platforms to divert the audience, make them curious, and increase your follower base.

If you have a post on Instagram, share it on Facebook, with the link of the original post on Instagram. This way, whenever they visit your social media profile, they will be able to access and visit the link in bio, your website.

You can even target your website visitors to present them offers on social media.

3. Share your posts in community groups

There are many community groups about your industry on every social media platform. You need to find the right one with active users who lie in your target audience.

Posting here introduces your content to more people, and since such groups have constant member additions, you can wrap more and more people in your funnel.

4. Ask your friends, family and employees/colleagues to share the posts

If your post has to garner good engagement in the 1st one hour of posting, it needs to be shared, more so by your 1st connection.

Ask them to share it on their social media profiles and among groups. Research suggests social media content shared by employees gets 8x more engagement than from brand accounts. This may be the push your posts need to get more followers and, thus, more website visitors.

5. Repurpose your content

Repurposing means changing the format of your content to increase its reach. You can convert your blog posts into carousels, videos, live sessions, infographics, cheatsheets, email newsletters, etc.

You can link the repurposed content back to the original one so that it gets promoted indirectly, and the users are visiting your website.

This blog post repurposing workflow by Social Champ broadly explains how you can break a single piece of content into different formats for maximum reach.

Step 7: Offer free resources and deals

Our heart skips a beat the minute we hear the word ‘FREE’ or ‘DISCOUNT.’ So, why can’t we use this to convert our audience and increase our website traffic?

When you give your audience something more than just products and services, they feel compelled to check it out, especially if it means that either they won’t have to spend money or will be able to save on it.

Let’s see how you can do this:

1. Special promotions and deals

Deals on festivals, or after reaching a particular milestone, give people a push. Whenever we set out to buy something, the first thing we do is ask if it’s on sale or search for a promotional code to get a discount.

What if you post your discount code and offer on social media to redirect them to your website?

This will not only give them something to check out your product but also build curiosity about your brand and products. The end action here will be to visit the website to avail the code or check out the deal.

2. Free resources

Offering your audience free and valuable resources like eBooks, buying guides, cheatsheets, checklists, and templates can contribute extensively to becoming a thought leader in the industry. These can be made in a downloadable format, available on your website, and promoted on your social media profiles.

These resources work the charm because it helps the audience solve their problems or increase their efficiency; thus, taking a step towards building faith in you as a brand.

To download the resource or avail the deal/discount code, they visit the website, and it’s a win-win situation.

Hubspot promoting its playbook on Twitter is an excellent example of a free resource.

Step 8: Engage with your audience directly

Brands and individuals often tend to overlook the social aspect of social media. Yes, social media platforms are great for content creation, but they’re also great for other important aspect-brand communication.

Research says that only 11% of customers get replies from online brands, and if you want to be in the top 1% in your industry, then engaging with your audience is the key.

Social media, a 2-way communication channel, allows you to engage with your audience directly. This increases brand recall value and their chances of visiting a brand’s website, which directly relates to them. Be a brand your customer loves because that’s one thing they will never forget. Focus on that, and provide value to your audience.

Imagine if you tweet about a brand, and they retweet it along with a comment, wouldn’t you feel special and maybe check out their page, website or even buy from them?

Let’s see how you can do this:

1. Reply to tweets, comments, and DMs

While you may not be active or available all the time to reply to your audience, hiring a social media manager can help the case. If a person messages or tweets about your brand, rather than no reply or worse, a bot reply will harm.

Here, a social media manager representing the brand and communicating with the audience will make them feel special and remind them that they responded to them.

You can even create conversational chatbots on platforms like Facebook to directly answer your customer’s questions and engage with them.

It would be best if you humanize your brand for people to start relating to you. You can occasionally respond to the best comments, maybe pin them on your post, retweet, or reply to their messages.

This will not only make them feel special, but your brand will earn a special place in their hearts. And, if they visit your profile, a clickable link to the website will call out to them, thus doing the trick.

Netflix is doing a great job of replying to comments on their Instagram posts!

2. Host giveaways, quizzes, and polls

Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have come up with a new feature for polls. You can directly question your audience for something fun or related to your brand and record their responses.

You can do this to know about their pain points, struggles in your niche, or if they like the content, you’re creating.

Giveaways are a great way to attract more people to your profile. You could ask them to comment on your post, tag a friend or share it on their story, and in return, they could get a shoutout on your page, a product sample, or maybe some other deal.

These bring in many people, thus increasing your profile’s reach and engagement, and eventually, the number of people visiting your website.

This giveaway by Buy me a Coffee is a Monday ritual, and the audience loves it!

3. Participate in conversations and trends

Memes and moment marketing are gaining momentum and for all the right reasons. Here, brands participate in an ongoing trend popular among the general audience with a post related to the trend and their brand.

This is humorous, witty, and a great way to engage the audience. You’re creating relatable content that will start a conversation, thus, contributing to your brand recall value.

4. Participate in public forums

Public forums like Reddit and Quora are great ways of engaging with your audience and answering questions where they lie. You can simply search for your niche keywords and answer relevant questions.

On Quora, you can include your website link once in every 3-4 answers and to your profile bio, so that people can visit it. This way, giving valuable answers to questions may garner more website visitors.

BuzzSumo co-founder answers questions relevant to his brand on Quora to engage with the audience.

You can also participate in conversations on Reddit and comment on your website link on subreddits that allow.

However, focus on value and not just linking your website because doing so may block your profile. The way to your consumer’s heart is through value.

Engagement and communication is an integral part of social media. If you want to increase your followers and profile visits, engaging with your audience and providing value are vital factors.

Step 9: Connect with Influencers

People who already have a significant follower base similar to your target audience can contribute to spreading the word, be it about your product, giveaway, deal, services, or simply, for brand awareness.

Since these people already have your target audience as followers and are popular among them, it’s easy to divert them. However, the difficult task is choosing the right influencer with the right set of audiences to endorse your brand and, in the process, build a relationship.

Here are some things you should keep in mind while selecting the right influencer:

1. Genre of content

Every influencer has a separate genre of content they create on their social media profiles and so, finding the one that fits with your brand’s personality and work is essential.

2. Location and audience

Social media is a diverse space, and your target audience and the influencer’s followers must be close in location, age, and language to ensure your efforts yield results.

3. Authentic reach

The influencers need to have a good follower base, yes, but it’s equally crucial that those followers are authentic. Today, it’s effortless to buy followers, and so, if you tie up with an influencer who doesn’t have an authentic reach, then your collaboration won’t be able to drive the desired results.

The larger the follower base, the more extensive reach your brand will get.

4. Engagement analytics

If your influencer has a good follower base but not-so-good engagement, it won’t work. You can assess this by seeing if their posts are getting likes, comments and if people are genuinely engaging with their posts.

If their content is engaging and gets a good response, your brand may also get returns.

5. Quality and value

Just choosing the right influencer is not enough, you’ll also have to see what type of posts they put out for collaborations and how innovative they are.

To do this, you can look at their partnership posts and get an idea. This will determine how much value the influencer can bring to the table and how you can benefit from it.

These stats by Omniconvert clearly suggest how vital influencer marketing is on social media platforms.

It is a great way to get the word out, but it all comes down to choosing the right one and drafting the right strategy, including the type of content they’ll put out, how, on which platform, and how frequently.

All this done with the right mindset and strategy will result in increased profile views and website traffic.

Step 10: Analyze your efforts

Now that you have taken significant measures towards achieving your goal of driving traffic to your website, it’s time to measure the results and assess the strategy.

There are 2 ways to do this:

1. Google Analytics

In the first step, we linked Google Analytics and your social media channels. Go back to it and assess the performance to see the difference in traffic from social media now and before you started.

You should also see the platform from which most traffic comes because you need to pay attention to this channel.

The idea here is to identify the gaps, analyze them, and tweak your strategy using these free courses to get an even better result.

2. Platform analytics

Analyzing how your profile performs on different platforms is vital to assess your efforts and the audience’s reaction to it.

However, not all social media platforms have in-built analytics except Instagram, which gives you an insight into your audience, top-performing posts, and reach.

Alternatively, you can use social media tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to check your performance.

Wrapping it up

Social media is a buzzing place to be, but you can leverage it to do more than just content creation and communication through the right set of actions. 

Driving traffic to your website through social media can work on many levels if you work out a strategy with a step-by-step approach. At every step of the way, analyze how you can do it better, and work on it.

‘’A brand is no longer what we tell the customer it is- it is what customers tell each other’’- Scott Cook

Be a brand. Do it at your own pace, start small, but start right because the initial foundations are fundamental, and you can create a first impression only once. And on social media, first impressions by brands matter a lot.

But if you think that you’ll have to invest a lot of time on social media and maybe you don’t have that time, then think again because this is where your audience is, and investing time once to drive results and keep the process going by keeping a team in place can yield great results.

You can even use team collaboration tools to keep the process efficient and consistent.

Social media is a gold mine to drive visitors to your website, organically. Leverage and maximize its potential to skyrocket your website traffic.

Good luck!