Do you know that social media drives around 30 – 50% of traffic for most websites? Back in 2014, social media was generating a stable figure of around 30% of all traffic.
The stats cannot be wrong and it means that social media is one of the driving force in today’s world. Therefore, if you need more traffic to your website, read this article… and you can thank me later on.
Here are some challenges you will face:
- Your website isn’t generating enough traffic from social media
- You tried to use different ‘so-called’ foolproof methods in gaining traffic (and failed tremendously)
- Influencers retweeting or resharing your posts don’t boost the traffic as much as you want
So, enough of that negativity above. Let’s dive in straight, shall we?
How To Effectively Attract More Social Shares
Step 1: Make your website shareable
Shareability plays a huge role in any social media marketing success. Put aside content and search engine marketing for one hour and let’s consider this.
You want your readers to share those articles on their social media accounts and you need to prepare a ‘platform’ for them to do so for you.
In easier terms, you need to have a working social media plugin on your blog or website.
Yes, it may sound challenging especially when it comes to plugins and stuff but trust me, it is easier than you think.
If you are using major content management system such as WordPress, they usually come inbuilt with these social media add-ons. For example, there are plugins such as JetPack, Easy Social Sharing plugin (paid) and Social Warfare (paid) to choose from.
You do not need coding skills to get them work as most of them are easily download, install and setup within minutes.
Here’s a tip for you.
You must provide options for your followers to ‘share it on social media’ and you should not assume that they will copy the link and share it instead.
Step 2: Encourage social sharing directly from your content
Social media marketing can be used in various forms. One of the powerful strategies which you can implement directly is merging content and social media marketing under one roof.
There are many things that you can integrate into your content to boost social shares and one of them is to use plugins in WordPress.
To start with, here are several plugins which can create powerful call-to-actions to encourage more shares in social media:
- Highlighter from SumoMe
- Click to Tweet from CoSchedule
- TweetDis by Tim Soulo
Here’s what these tools can do for you (one cool example):
As you can see above, these plugins are able to create eye-catching sentences (visual effects) which will encourage your readers to share content on their social media account in just one click (by clicking on the “Click to Tweet” sentence.
SumoMe Highlighter is also something to shout about where it allows your readers to share content based on what they like on either Twitter, Facebook or both!
All the reader need to is to drag and highlight the sentence and a box will automatically pop up for them to share on social media.
Now, what does this means to you?
You will be able to share more content on social media (thanks to your followers) and it further encourages your followers to share because you have provided the needed ‘platform’ to get the job done, easily!
How hard can that be, right?
3. Engage with your current social media followers
When is the last time you reached out to your followers and notifying them on your new posts? I’m pretty guilty of that too.
Take a look at Neil Patel’s Facebook page. Whenever he publishes a new blog post, it will share it across on social media. This doesn’t only generate more clicks and shares, it also creates more readability and engagement level.
Unless you have a die-hard fan, it is hard for your followers to notice a new post on your blog. In order to cope up with this challenge, a simple social share on social media platforms could drive your referral traffic up by a mile.
Furthermore, you can also encourage them to share the post with their friends or family.
You will never know as this could lead to much better conversion since there is trust bonded between them and their friends.
4. Publishing at the right time
Time. The essence of eternity.
In social media, time is everything. You either make it … or you don’t. According to statistic, there are thousands of social media updates every second. Now, your post is going to be buried in the sea of content if you don’t get this right.
In this case, you need to focus on publishing at the right time and publishing means that you should publish posts at the right time on your blog, as well as the right time when publishing a social media update.
There are many ways that you can publish posts at the right time. For example, using tools such as Hootsuite will allow you to determine the best time to post an update on social media.
When you publish posts at the right time, you will be able to reach a bigger audience and in return a higher chance to get more engagement of your posts (on both blog and social media).
In other words, you do not want to publish a post in the middle of the night as there would be very less viewers at that time.
Apart from Hootsuite, you can also use various analytics tools which will be able to provide you with estimation on the time and interest of your readers reaching your blog.
By having such analytics statistics, you are able to become a smart marketer and at the same time, doubling the results which you can get from both your blog and social media accounts.
Now, it is your turn!
There are many strategies which you can use to attract more social shares and believe it or not, most of them are extremely easy to do. All you need is to spend a little time trying to understand the demand in the market and work out a plan to boost your social shares.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and let’s discuss!
See also: Why Should You Consider Using Social Media Services?
