How to Increase Social Media Traffic to Your Website Up to 850%

Want to increase social media traffic to your website?

With Google’s constant algorithm changes and the debut of AI content results, you know you can’t always rely on organic search traffic.

But over the past year, we’ve seen a huge increase in social media referral traffic to our website! Check out our results and learn how we did it, so that you can implement our tactics in your own strategy.

So, what do I mean by dramatic results?

Our Increased Social Media Traffic Stats

We increased referral traffic from Facebook by more than 700%

This referral traffic was what I consider quality traffic:

• The bounce rate for this segment decreased an average of 51.73%.
• The average number of pages visited per session for this segment was 1.9, above the average for all users.
• This segment spent an average of 1 minute and 56 seconds on the website.

While we did do some paid Facebook advertising in July and August, we also saw a huge increase in referral traffic afterwards. Perhaps a trickle down effect of the paid promotions we did during the summer.

We increased social media traffic from Twitter by 250%

This referral traffic was also quality traffic:

• The bounce rate for this segment decreased an average of 51.93%.
• The average number of pages per visited per session for this segment was 2.11, an 11.64% improvement.
• This segment spent an average of 3 minutes and 4 seconds on the website.

We increased referral traffic from LinkedIn by more than 850%

Once again, this traffic was quality traffic:

• The bounce rate for this segment decreased an average of 64.10%.
• The average number of pages visited per session for this segment was 2.74 , which is well above the average for all users.
• This segment spent an average of 2 minutes and 26 seconds on the website.

We did not do any paid advertising on LinkedIn or Twitter.

How do I get those kinds of results? Well, let me tell you.

How You Can Increase Social Media Traffic

We were able to get these results by spending about 10 hours a week on social media and another 5 or so hours on design and image optimization. Yes, optimizing your social media images is important!

That said, we also did a lot of preliminary work and put a lot of time and effort into creating content that we could share on our social media accounts, which is not included in that 10 hours a week number.

If you haven’t been optimizing your image size for each platform up to this point, don’t spend hours going back and resizing all your images. I didn’t.

That said, make it a practice to do so going forward. It’s worth it. Seriously.

1. Get to Know Your Audience

I can’t believe how many times I’ve written that down. It’s been said time and time again. The first step to any marketing plan or strategy, is know your target audience.

You can do this a number of different ways. My favorite is creating buyer personas and talking with our sales and customer service teams.

I know strategy works because if I look at the analytics for Cheeky Monkey’s accounts, I can see that:

• Individuals engaging with us on Twitter tend to be in the income bracket that we would expect for someone that can make decisions about purchasing our web development, design, and marketing services.

• Similarly, our LinkedIn visitors are in senior or managerial positions, that is, decision makers who may be interested in our services.

It comes down to this: It doesn’t matter how you do it, just make sure you get to know your audience. End of story.

2. Carefully Choose Your Social Media Platforms

With so many social media platforms out there, it’s really tempting to try to be on all of them.

Don’t give in to the temptation.

You want to focus on the platform with the highest ROI. This doesn’t necessarily mean the platform with the most buzz.

Rather, you want to focus on:

• The platforms that your target audience spends most of their time on.
• The platforms where your content gets the most engagement.
• The platforms that have a higher conversion rate, whatever conversions might look like to you. For example, a conversion could be a new lead, a newspaper sign-up, or a donation.

In the end, no matter how many platforms you choose to focus on, whether it’s 1 or 5, make sure you have the resources available to post and engage consistently.

For example:

At Cheeky Monkey Media, our social media efforts focus on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We focus on these because:

1. It’s where our target audience hangs out.
2. We only have so many resources to devote to social media.

Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so.

3. Make Sure Your Profiles are on Brand and Consistent

Once you’ve decided which social media platforms you’re going to focus on, you need to make sure that each and every one of your social media profiles is fully filled out, on brand, and consistent across the board.

Here’s what I mean:

Facebook:

Learn how to optimize your Facebook Page cover photo with the latest free template (updated yearly).

Twitter:

You can also find lots of great info on the latest Twitter image sizes.

LinkedIn:

As you can see, our profile pages don’t look exactly the same, but, they are consistent and recognizable as part of the Cheeky Monkey Media brand.

4. Connect with Influencers

Make a list of the influencers in your sector. These do not have to be the biggest names in your industry. They can be micro influencers.

For example, I include guys like Rand Fishkin from Moz, one of the biggest names in SEO, on my list. Rand’s awesome and responded to the email I sent him. However, I had more success reaching a larger audience and creating relationships when I interacted with smaller names on my list.

Finding influencers can be tedious: you have to first know a handful of names, then see where it takes you. And all that sourcing sometimes doesn’t yield much. It could take hours, even days, just to compile a big enough list.

I recommend using NinjaOutreach for this purpose because you can easily find any influencers in your niche with a simple keyword search. You can know nothing and nobody, and yet still get substantial results on who to connect with later.

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Note: Try Ninja Outreach free for 14 days. If you decide to purchase a plan, LouiseM.com will receive a referral fee that helps support our free content. Thanks!

Once you’ve compiled your list, make sure you interact with them:

• Follow them with your social media accounts.
• Ask them questions.
• Share their content.
• Include them in your blog posts as resources, let them know via email that you link to them, and give them credit in your social media posts.
• Really like something they say? Call them out on it! Highlight that awesome-ness with fancy visuals.

5. Be Ready with Killer Content

You aren’t going to get far if you aren’t ‘social’ on social (step 6) and curating great content (step 7), but you can’t forget the importance of creating and sharing your own valuable content and information.

Creating and sharing your own content will help you position yourself as an expert and/or valued resource in your area.

Now, I don’t mean that you should create multiple blogs, videos, infographics, and interactive games a day. There’s an oversaturation of content as is.

Instead …

Ask your audience and your team what type of content they need and create

You do need to participate in the conversation with informative and engaging content.

My favorite way to do this is to talk to the sales team at Cheeky and see what kinds of questions prospective clients are asking.

Then, I write the most informative blog possible on that topic. It’s a win, win. I know I’m writing content that matters to our target audience right now, and I able to provide the sales team with valuable content.

Use Secondary Sources and Acknowledge Them

At Cheeky, our blogs have to be at least 900-1200 words long, and they have to include at least 5 external links.

There are three reasons for this:

1. One, I don’t want us talking at the world, I want us participating in and contributing to a greater conversation.
2. Two, let’s be honest, we didn’t come up with all this information. Credit needs to be given where credit is due. And, than there’s all those years of post secondary education and graduate school that made me a bit of stickler for proper citation.
3. Using and acknowledging other people’s work gives you a chance to reach out to those individuals, get their feedback, build a relationship, and maybe even increase your reach.

6. Talk to People! It’s Called Social Media For a Reason

You don’t have to have marathon conversations, but it’s always a good idea to thank people for sharing or retweeting your posts and asking questions.

Even exchanging a series of GIFs counts as a social exchange. My favorite social conversations on the Cheeky Twitter account were with a reporter in Ontario and the team at Buffer.

Here’s an example from my chat with the team at Buffer:

7. Curate Content.

You’re probably one of the coolest people ever, and the organization you work for probably kicks some serious a$$.

But, there’s a couple things you need to know about social:

1. It’s not all about you (or your organization). I know, it sucks.
2. You don’t have to do it alone. Yay!

Share information from your favorite blogs, news sites, and influencers. Better yet, share content from your clients and supporters.

Use places like Buzzsumo or CRATE to find other content in your niche. This not only saves you and your team from creating that content, it also, again, shows that you are participating in part of a larger conversation.

Use the 80/20 Rule

When curating content, try to strike a balance.

8. Use a Social Media Management System

When I started at Cheeky, I was strongly against using social media management tools.

For starters, Scott Stratten, the co-author of UnMarketing, is not a fan. And then there’s that whole thing about Facebook’s algorithm frowning on automated posts.

But, then I realized that if I wanted to post twice a day on Facebook, ten times a day on Twitter, and once a day on LinkedIn, and get the rest of my internal and client work done, I was going to have to concede complete and total control. Sigh.

Don’t completely automate though!

That said, don’t completely automate your social media communications. Review your notifications at least daily and respond to those who comment, respond, or retweet personally.

If you would like to acknowledge new followers (which is a great strategy when you are just starting to grow your follower base), personalize that interaction.

9. Keep Iterating

Once you find a strategy that works, make that your core strategy. That said, don’t stop trying new things.

You can test everything from posting slightly different content, to posting more video, to posting more or less times in a day. Really, the list is endless.

My recommendation is to test one or two small changes for a week or 2, review your results, and then decide if the test is worth implementing or pursuing further, or, if you’re better off trying something else.

A Few Last Thoughts

As I wrote this post, one question kept nagging at me. Was there one strategy that made the biggest difference?

I don’t think so.

While the biggest increase in engagement seemed to correlate with the push to ‘tag’ micro influencers, our followers, and potential followers, and the commitment to consistent and frequent publishing, I couldn’t have taken these steps if we hadn’t taken the time to get to know our target audience and produce valuable content.

Thus, I would argue that you need to apply all of these tactics to your social media strategy in order to see significant improvements.

At the end of the day, like with all things in life, you’re only going to get as much out of your social media marketing as you put into it.

That doesn’t mean spending all of your time on social, but it does mean taking the time to do it right.

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