Social media platforms have huge impact on businesses and personal lives as well. These days, everyone use one or multiple social media platforms. In fact it is very common for a person to be present on multiple social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit and many more. It is an estimate that the social media users worldwide have exceeded the 4.2 billion figure and these all are active social media users. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE the broadband and fast 4G/5G internet is in reach of everyone, almost 99% of the population is using internet all around the country and almost the same number of people are actively using social media with an average time on internet of almost 8 hours and out of that almost 3 hours on the social media platforms. That number is huge, every business should realize the importance of it and should leverage social media to build their digital marketing campaigns. In fact in modern world, most of the innovative and most impactful campaigns gain strength from the social media alone. That is why it is extremely important for any business to pro-actively manage their social media platforms.
Businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE in fact all across the world use digital marketing tactics to improve their online presence and to generate more businesses from online channels. All B2B, B2C businesses regardless of the size and industry utilize social media platforms to improve their online presence. That is because the social media platform have a lot of users which can be your potential customers, and on top of that the customer behavior and market trends demand it too. These days’ customers consider online presence as a very important aspect to weight and judge a business. If a business have established a strong online presence the prospects would be comfortable and confident in converting into a lead/sale. If a business failed to build their brand over online channels then the chances are they will most likely lose a huge number of customers. Businesses usually don’t sell at social media platforms, in fact they use them to build reputation and to bring traffic to their website and landing pages where the prospect can be converted into a lead. It is very obvious that the social media platforms are a great tool for mass communication and to quickly reach out to your customers and audience.
The social media platforms are used to promote brands and increase brand awareness. Businesses can promote content, establish a brand image with their content and communication and gain trust of the users. The social media platforms can also help businesses in improving engagements with its customers and targeted audience which help them strengthen their relationship with their customers. More importantly the social media platforms can be used to drive traffic to business/corporate website. The website traffic plays a crucial role in online leads and conversions. As much traffic a website will have as many leads, conversions and sales it can get from it. More website traffic means more leads and sales, it is that simple. In this blog we will discuss the most effective tactics to increase your website traffic from social media platforms. This will help you grow gradually in cyber space as well as a continuous increase in website traffic and leads down the road.
- Focus More on Popular Social Media Platforms that Drive Most Web Traffic
- Optimize Social Media Profiles and Put your Website’s Link in Bio Section
- Increase Customer Reach and Engagement with Social Media Profiles and Pages
- Add Homepage, Landing Page or Internal Page links to Social Media Posts
- Optimize Content to Increase CTR (Click Through Rate)
- Proactively Share Links in Social Media Groups and Forums
- Optimize Content Posting Strategy to Maximize the Website Traffic
- Encourage Follower to Opt for Notifications and Alerts
Focus More on Popular Social Media Platforms that can Drive Most Web Traffic
The simplest strategy to drive huge traffic to your website from social media platforms is to choose the most popular social media channels based on the available data and stats. According to a study by GrowthBadger the Facebook is the social media platform delivering most website traffic, to be specific around 65% of the total social media traffic. Which is more than all other social media combined. Regardless of the industry the Facebook dominates in delivering the most website traffic. However, it is not as that simple, for a very few specific industries some other social media platform can also provide a huge amount of website traffic. It largely depends on your targeted audience, the market trends, region and language, etc. So, it is important to analyze your current customer base and see which social media platform is the most popular among them. Furthermore you can always start with working on most popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. However, in Dubai and all around the UAE the Instagram and Pinterest are also very popular, however, as per the stats they are the least traffic drivers for any business website.
The two major factors that you should consider are the overall size of the social media platform in terms of users and its popularity in your targeted regions. For example, the most of the Tiktok users are from US and among the top 20 list Spain lies at the end. Therefore it is important to check the popularity for the social media in your targeted regions as well. This will help you get more audience more quickly and you will be able to generate more traffic. However, there is one more important thing, which is some social media platform are not good at sending users to external websites, for example, despite being so popular the Instagram accounts for only 1% social media website traffic. These all are important things to consider before you choose a social media platform for your website traffic building campaign. Obviously these all are general stats, it is crucial to understand your niche as well. For each niche different social media platforms can yield different outcomes. That is why it is important to analyze the expected performance of each social media for your niche. Here is an overview of world’s most popular social media platforms and the traffic they bring for each niche.
[Image Source:https://growthbadger.com/traffic-study/]
Optimize Social Media Profiles and Put your Website’s Link in Bio Section
Around 3.6 Billion people use social media daily around the world. Businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE create their social media profiles and pages to boost their digital marketing. However, one thing that most business neglect is properly optimizing their social media profile as per their digital marketing goals and objectives. Obviously a business can and should have presence on multiple social media platforms. Each social media platform have different way of allotting user names or handlers, it is important to use a unique and universal social media name across all your platforms. Which should also be your brand name, people who will be seeing your brand on these social media platform should be able to recognize you instantly just by reading your name. This also help search engines to index all your social media profiles and pages and help boosting your SEO (search engine optimization) too. Each bio or about section should be 100% complete and filled with most relevant information only. Some social media platforms allow multiple links, some allow only one or two. Whatever the case is you should add the link of your corporate website on social media profiles and pages. Hashtags help improving search performance and can bring more website traffic through the links in bio/about section or in posts.
Increase Customer Reach and Engagement with Social Media Profiles and Pages
The social media engagement is basically the interactions people are having with your social media profiles and pages, it is measured in terms of likes, shares, follows, etc. Businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE often complaint about having large followings but very less post interactions or engagements. For example, a business could have 200 thousand followers but only handful of them like, share or comment on the posts. First thing to start with is to measure your current engagement, you can use analytical tools, or you can simply note down your numbers of followers and average post likes, shares, tags, mentions, comments, replies, etc. Focus on the content and start posting content for a week, then measure again, keep testing the same communication language for at least two months, then analyze how it is helping you out. Then change your strategy, and analyze the impact. This will be a very learning phase, and learning is extremely important for social media strategies. There is no one-fit-all strategy for social media engagements and customer reach. Each business is different, have different goals and objectives, have different audience groups, and have different public perception and image, so the response to different strategies would be different.
You will have to tune up your strategy until you get the desired results, but never give up on monitoring and analysis of the performance. Another most important thing is to understand your audience. For that different analytical tools can be used or some social media platforms also provide in-built analysis tools. Which will provide you basic details about the demographic data and location data of your audience. That would be enough to understand who your audience is. For a legal service provider and a toy seller, the audience, communication language, resources or content you share would be entirely different. But you should also keep it in mind that most of the people come to social media for entertainment purposes. You shouldn’t take social media communication as official correspondence or communication, it is different. People get bored seeing only one topic all the time, if you keep talking about your product or services only you might never get the desired reach and engagement. You should seriously consider what is happening around you, what your audience might be interested in and what could get their attentions, but be advised, engaging in political, religious or any other controversial subject could be devastating for your business.
Add Homepage, Landing Page or Internal Page links to Social Media Posts
We have already discussed the importance of having your business’s website’s link in your social media profile’s bio or about section. Some social media platform allow adding multiple links, some allow only 1 link. On top of that the bio/about section also have character limit on it. However, the social media posts can be turned into a traffic driving tool. Especially when you have a fully optimized profile with adequate customer reach and engagement you can utilize your posts to share links of you website’s homepage, internal page or any other landing page. It is better to put one link in a single post, but more can be published given the social media support the feature. Here is how most popular social media platform allow posting links on the posts:
- Facebook: It is very simple to add links to Facebook posts. You can add links in the timeline posts as well as stories. While posting an image, the image can be anchored to an external link, while you can post plain text in the content area to keep the look neat.
- Instagram: Instagram doesn’t allow publishing clickable links in the regular posts (feeds) and reels. However, you can post links in the Stories and IGTV caption. However, it is a good practice to mention that you have a link in your bio and readers can click it to get more information.
- Twitter:Tweets are a great way to share links, Twitter can automatically add link preview to you Tweets. However, when using images or carousals you should use website links to bring more traffic to the homepage or important pages.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn also allow offer same functionality as Facebook, you can put a link in the caption while sharing an image and the image will automatically turned into a clickable link, after that you can remove it from caption to keep it clean and neat.
- YouTube:YouTube has a huge visitors’ base, it completely dominates the market, businesses, individuals, media, governments, and everyone is using YouTube. It allow adding links in the caption of your video, you can also put links at the end of the video and pop-ups during the video.
It is better to put the relevant links on the posts. Irrelevant links will repel your followers. Sharing only homepage link is not enough, you should also promote internal pages, products/services, and other important pages such as blogs, PRs. Etc. This will help diversify your traffic distribution will also be very helpful for the SEO (search engine optimization).Businesses also use a specialized landing page for such links. This page is designed to provide a variety of different direction to the visitors, for example, you have 4 main categories of your products or services, and you can bring your visitors to a landing page which could have all 4 categories listed as distinguishable sections. Better to use less content, in fact only title would do well. The user can then decide what interests them and they can further move ahead accordingly. Sharing links with posts is a great way to generate huge traffic from social media platforms.
Optimize Content to Increase CTR (Click Through Rate)
Creating social media profiles and pages, filling them up with you information, contact details and links is not enough to get huge traffic from your social media channels. The content you post on your social media drive visitors engagements and help you reach out to more users, this is from where you can generate huge traffic. The visual esthetics, content, message, wordings, and even links you post will impact on the CTR. The CTR or click through rate is basically the measure of clicks people made on your posts to reach to your website or its pages. The best strategy to get more clicks is to trigger your readers’ curiosity and leave them carving for more. This can significantly increase your CTR. However, it is important to maintain a level of professional communication and decency in it. Here is how you can do it, without harming user experience and your brand reputation:
- Use High Quality Image/Media: That is one of the most important factor in CTR. Posting high quality image or media is crucial, because this is the very first thing a reader will ever notice about your post.
- Pay More Attentions to Your Headline:The headline is another great way to capture readers’ attentions. Short, to-the-point, relevant and simple-to-understand headline will get you more clicks. Adding keywords, numbers can also improve CTR.
- Strong Value Proposition:The description or caption of your social media post should communicate a strong value proposition. This will convince your readers’ to click on the link to understand the subject and see if it can offer some value to them or not.
- Use FOMO Statements:The FOMO means ‘fear of missing out’ and it is a great technique to give your readers an impression of how important that link could be or what they could miss out if they will not click on it.
- Hook Your Audience:It will intrigue them to continue engaging with your content. Writing something very interesting in the headline or in the caption, tell only half of the story and let them click to see the full story will surely increase your CTR.
- CTA: The CTA or Call to Action is a great strategy to improve the CTR. The call to action or CTA statement should be simple and it can be combined with value proposition statement to further improve its effectiveness.
It is crucial to deliver what you promised in your social media posts. The link should take the visitor to a page which can meet their expectations. Avoid misleading, sensationalized and clickbait statements, this will harm your reputation and people will start avoiding your posts, which will eventually cost you, subscribers, followers, or fans.
Proactively Share Links in Social Media Groups and Forums
Groups are mostly found in the social media platforms however, the forums are usually independent websites which allow people to create groups, categories, etc. of likeminded people or alike topics. Businesses can utilize social media groups such as Facebook Groups and LinkedIn groups to share relevant content in the relevant group. This can bring you great traffic, as in such groups the members are all interested in a particular topic, niche or category. If the content posted is relevant to your business and groups also have chances of getting more clicks and shares from the group members. Businesses can also create groups of their customers and audience to gain more clicks. Furthermore there are several forums which can also generate a huge amount of website traffic such as Quora and Reddit. Such platforms have large audience and they also provide facility to post links and form groups which can help you targeting relevant audience as well. Important thing to understand is that if you are posting in a group you should post like any other group member, you should be able to engage with the groups and forums. Too much and too frequent content sharing can be considered as a spam. It is better to share your content and links in an organic and natural way, as the others are doing.
Optimize Content Posting Strategy to Maximize the Website Traffic
It is important to understand how people are interacting with your business over social media. What time they are most active what time they won’t be listening, etc. There is no rule of people’s behavior over the social media networks. In some countries and regions people might be sitting on social media during the night, somewhere it could be evening and somewhere else it could be afternoon. You have to closely analyze the analytical data from the device. Perfect content performs better if the posting time is right. If the posting time is wrong the content or social media post might not get the full response from everyone. You can check analytical data to identify which part of the day got more clicks, likes or follow. This will help you build your content posting strategy. If the right content is offered at the right time, businesses not only gain more traffic but the chances of conversion or sales are also high. The content optimization is a tactics to boost CTR but if the content posting timing is not correct then the CTR will remain low. Businesses can use social media management tools to schedule posting for the right time of the day. Some social media platforms also allow scheduling which can be used to improve the CTR.
The content posting strategy is not only about the timing. In fact it is also about choosing the right topic. Businesses tend to post mostly about their own products and services, or events and news about the business on their social media platforms. This is not a good strategy. Because most of the customers might not be interested in the culture or team activities but they would be interested in products, market and industry news, and what is happening related to the products or services you are offering. A good social media content posting strategy always include a wide spectrum of topics, which includes your own products, services, industry news, useful information, blogs, relevant topics, and content that have an element of entertainment in it. This type of strategy will help you increasing your followings and fan base on social media platforms. People who are using social media are primarily there for entertainment purposes, there are certain social media platforms that focus more on serious subjects, but mostly are focused on entertaining content. It is important that your content strategy is delivering both professional communication, brand message and also entertaining and interesting content to keep users engaged and interested in your social media pages and profiles.
Encourage Follower to Opt for Notifications and Alerts
All major social media platforms offer facility to opt for alerts and notifications. These alerts and notifications inform users/followers whenever their favorite page or profile post something on their timeline. Businesses should frequently ask followers to opt for their page’s alerts or notification to get instant delivery of the content in their messenger or dashboard. Such alerts are a great way to boost post engagements and post views. As much views a post will get as many chances of getting a click will be. The social media platforms are very active and timelines or feeds are updating in real-time. Mostly the social media platforms run on automated algorithms which are designed to deliver the latest and relevant content to users’ profiles and feeds. One can’t say how many of their followers would be online when they will be posting. The automated AI based algorithms deliver content on the bases of user preference and their interests and also try to show most recent content. People tend to follow several profiles and pages at a time. Which means all other would also be posting something, so your content could buried down by the time the user will login. However, if they have opted for the alerts and notifications, no matter how busy their feeds are, they will can reach to your content from the dashboard or notification. Such tactics help businesses boost clicks on their posts and bring more traffic to their website.
Conclusion
Businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE are investing huge in their digital marketing efforts to improve their online presence. Every business could have different goals and objectives, however, there is one thing that every business wants which is more leads and sales. The digital marketing in general and the social media in particular can play an important role to boost your online leads and conversions. There is no rule or one-fits-all strategy to digital marketing that can guarantee more leads and conversions. However, one thing is universal, more website traffic means more enquiries, leads and sales. For that different businesses adopt different digital marketing tactics and work on different social media platforms and digital marketing channels to bring traffic to their website. In this blog we have covered the most effective social media strategies to leverage social media profiles and pages to generate more website traffic. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want us to help you with you digital marketing needs, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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