Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 Social media marketing is essential for increasing traffic to your website, landing pages, blog posts, and more. Social media can help you build brand recognition, foster a community around your business, and grow your bottom line. It can also be a key driver of traffic to your website. It’s the second most frequently cited benefit, right behind brand exposure and ahead of lead generation, brand loyalty, and garnering more sales. Here are nine ways to rapidly get more traffic from social media: 1. Optimize your social profiles People look at your bio section or profile to learn more about your brand. It should communicate your brand’s value proposition quickly and establish your tone. Make it clear and concise to attract the attention of your ideal audience. Don’t write your entire business story in the bio. A few lines are enough. Next, connect your bio to your site with a CTA (call to action) for your homepage or landing page. 2. Leverage social proof You can use social credibility to reinforce your site’s value. Social proof is essentially like any testimonial or review because it integrates the human voice into your brand experience. When people are looking for information or recommendations about a product or service or considering making a purchase, they will look for reviews and referrals. Make sure you incorporate reviews, feedback, social comments, feedback, etc., in your website. Your “About Us” page works great for this. You should only use social proof that you are allowed to repurpose. Include third-party media coverage about your brand. Take a look at Grammarly’s company profile on LinkedIn to see how they used the number of customers (30 million people and 30,000 teams) as social evidence. Grammarly uses social proof on LinkedIn PRO TIP: Be brief. Make viewers interested in clicking on the “Learn more” button. 3. Use less popular social media platforms, too. Two rapidly growing social media platforms that may be great options to speed up your web traffic and social media presence are Reddit and Pinterest. They can help you depending on your audience, topics, and interests. Reddit Reddit, with its 52 million daily active users, may be an excellent opportunity for you. It’s easy to find subreddits (i.e., forums) in your niche. Participate in the discussions. You can post your questions, comment, and share long-form educational perspectives. People will seek out your advice if they find it helpful. PRO TIP: Don’t use Reddit to promote and market directly. Provide value. A written advertisement with a self-serving purpose is not something anyone wants to read. It will likely result in negative comments on the forum and potentially get you banned from the platform if you do this repeatedly. Pinterest Pinterest currently averages 478 million monthly visitors, an increase of 30% year-over-year. It’s a powerful tool for consumer discovery and is very effective for content marketing. In addition, 60% of Pinterest users are women, which matters if they are your target audience. 4. Time your posts correctly It’s impossible to drive traffic to your site if you post social content when no one in your audience engages. Choose the best time to get maximum views. Look at your data instead of following best practices in social media post timing. Find out when your target audience is most responsive. Apps like Sprout Social can help you create and execute effective paid and organic campaigns powered by social engagement data. 5. Make your share buttons conspicuous Let’s suppose that someone comes across your blog and loves the content. They may consider sharing a post but can’t find a way to do so. They move on. You can prevent this from happening by embedding sharing buttons next to your content. Then, as proof that people find your content worth sharing, you can show the number of shares. 6. Promote your content Many content marketers neglect to use social media to promote blogs or other relevant content. You should, at a minimum, promote your high-quality blog posts to increase visibility. You can drive traffic to your website by sharing excerpts or teasers via social media with a link — doing so can encourage viewers to visit your site to read more. You can also promote older but still relevant content on social media that will interest new followers. PRO TIP: Share the same content multiple times to attract people who may not have noticed it or seen it before. 7. Engage your audience Your target audience should be the focus of your social media content. Provide content that is useful for them. Then, encourage and engage them to help them reach their goals. To increase engagement: Focus on open-ended questions when creating content. Ask questions that provoke a response. Ask yes/no questions, or use a multiple-choice format. Organize a poll. Organize interactive quizzes and award prizes to the winners. 8. Be responsive Respond to all comments on your social media posts — this will make your audience feel valued. And include a link back to your website for more information. You can differentiate your brand by responding quickly. Your competitors may have deeper pockets, but if you’re responsive, engaging, and show that you genuinely want to build relationships, your brand will stand out. Integrate customer service into your social media to ensure that your brand responds quickly to queries or complaints. Customers’ experiences are not only important to you, but they also provide proof to potential customers about how your company will treat them. 9. Be visible Social media users respond better to visual content than text. This content includes images, infographics, videos, and presentations that can be used to create an emotional connection with your target market and elicit strong reactions. Today, people have an attention span of fewer than nine seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish. Our brains can recognize a familiar object in only 100 milliseconds, making visual content the best way to communicate. This means that images are more important than ever, especially on social media. You can use images by themselves or in conjunction with text. Use authentic photos instead of stock photos to connect with your target audience and customers. Infographics Creating infographics will help you repurpose your content. Merriam-Webster defines an infographic as “a chart, diagram, or illustration (as in a book or magazine, or on a website) that uses graphic elements to present information in a visually striking way.” Infographics are handy for translating complex or detailed information. Make the data simple to understand at first glance. Video Use video, too, both live and recorded. If you aren’t consistently producing videos for your social media channels, you’re behind the curve. You should create content relevant to your customer journey and amplify it to help you connect with your audience — and gain more followers and engagement with your brand. Live video increases interaction. One example is hosting a Q&A session each week to engage with your audience. You could host it in a live format or ask your audience to submit questions ahead of time to make sure you are ready to answer them. In addition, you can create video webinars and similar presentations to drive viewers to your site. Increase your traffic from social media! These social media strategies can help you drive more visitors to your website. If you are consistent, your efforts will lead to results. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article originally appeared on Pam Hughes and has been republished with permission.Find out how to syndicate your content with B2C Author: Pam Hughes Follow @_pamhughes Pam Hughes is a Forbes Top-25 Social Media Influencer (known as Pam Dyer at the time). She helps people and organizations stand out from the crowd by generating and maintaining brand awareness through inbound digital marketing strategy and execution. Pam has deep experience across social media marketing, branding, content marketing, … View full profile ›More by this author:Voice Search: 6 Invaluable SEO Strategies to Improve Your RankEasy Creative Tips to Make Your TikTok Ads Work HarderHow Many Instagram Hashtags Are Best For Engagement?