This is the fourth Thursday post about how to encourage people to visit your site. The full list of approaches to increasing traffic is in the earlier post “How to Help the Right People Find Your Site”.
Social media is popular because it is fun and immediately accessible to the user. It can be an effective way to drive traffic to your site. However, there are some issues you need to consider. Social media can be:
- Excessive. There are so many social media platforms, it is impossible to use them all effectively. So, you need to decide to use 2 or 3 really well and not spread your attention too thinly.
- Complex. Decide what you want to do and design your social media presence accordingly. It is easy to be drawn into activity that distracts from your purpose. If you are clear about your purpose the chances are people contacting you through your social media will understand it too.
- Ephemeral. Your followers on Twitter, likes on Facebook and whatever else you have are platform dependent. So long as the platform persists and you keep an eye on any changes they make to way they present your material, you should be OK. But do watch out for changes. Remember, ultimately you have no control of your social media content.
Do not think of social media as an end in itself. If you have a product, service or cause you can promote it effectively on social media but it is always best to encourage people who like your social media activity to visit your website and join your list. Broadly you can approach social media in two ways.
- produce content on your website, eg publicise blog posts on social media. This is easy to set up and should generate traffic to your blog.
- or post material on social media that invites followers to visit your site, eg use videos on YouTube to invite viewers to sign u[ on your site.
It is possible to have a web presence solely on social media and there may be circumstances where this makes sense. However, your website has some advantages:
- You can store and share all your content on your website. It tends to be dispersed on social media.
- You know it will always be there and not subject to changes in your social media platforms.
- Your email lists are yours and cannot be removed by the social media platform.
Have you any examples of effective use of social media either to drive traffic to a website or making a direct sale of a product, service or cause?
