Get Traffic from Social Media on Your Website

Translated by Núria Adell.

On average, 31% of referral traffic to websites comes from social networks. This number was published on a post by Danny Wong that has been widely shared on several blog posts.

According to Avinash Kaushik (Beginner’s Guide to Web Data Analysis: Ten Steps to Love and Success), the author of Web Analytics 2.0, on a website with a balanced traffic acquisition:

• between 40% and 50% of the traffic should come from search engines,
• between 20% and 30% should come from external links,
• around 20% should be direct traffic,
• around 10% should come through ad campaigns.

Thus, combining the previous numbers (referral traffic constitutes to 20% or 30% of the total, and of this, 31% corresponds to social networks), we can deduce that between 6% and 9% of total traffic to a site comes through social networks. Even though this is not a big figure, it shouldn’t be ignored, don’t you think?

Does your website achieve this piece of pie? If it doesn’t, I will now explain how we’re working to make sure we actually get traffic from social networks.

1. Define your Buyer Persona

As part of your marketing plan you have to be clear on who your audience and your target market are. On the post of our marketing plan Buyer Persona of Nelio Content, I talked about the initial process we went through to identify our Buyer Persona.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better. – Sam Kusinitz (The Definition of a Buyer Persona [in Under 100 Words]

It might seem very easy to find out who our clients are… but it’s not. In fact, in a speech by Enrique Jiménez, the CEO of Digital Group which we attended during the Barcelona Startup Week, he said he found that several marketing campaigns had failed precisely because they hadn’t correctly identified their client. For instance, some mobile phone campaigns addressed to teenagers ignored the fact that the real buyer of the phone would be an adult.

But carrying on with our case, here you have a sample of one of our Buyer Persona.

Be aware that, as Toni mentioned in How to Create a Successful Editorial Calendar for Your Blog,  properly defining your audience is key to the generation of ideas on posts that you will write on your blog, as well as to create content on your social networks.

2. Define your keywords

After defining your Buyer Persona, and also as part of your SEO strategy, you should define the keywords that will attract traffic to your website (and product) and that, at the same time, best will respond to the searches of your users. You might have read the post on SEO Strategy, in which I talked about how we looked for keywords for the launch of Nelio Content.

The keywords should be used in the posts of your blog on the titles, content, categories and tags to improve the positioning on the search engines. But they’re also the ones you should use on social networks precisely to attract your target audience.

And here comes the one million dollar question…

Nelio Content

I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.

Panozk

WordPress.org

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3. In which social networks should I promote my content?

We all have an idea of the type of users that each social network has. Without going into detail on each of these, here’s a graph on recent statistics that I have elaborated from several sources that you can use as summary:

If you want to share this infographic, copy the following fragment:

<div style="clear: both;"><a href="https://neliosoftware.com/blog/get-traffic-from-social-media-on-website/"><img title="Get Traffic from Social Media on Your Website" src="https://neliosoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Social-Media-Statistics-1.png" alt="Get Traffic from Social Media on Your Website" border="0" /></a></div><div>Thanks to: <a href="https://neliosoftware.com/blog/get-traffic-from-social-media-on-website/">Nelio Software</a></div>

On the other hand, having defined your Buyer Persona should help you determine in which social networks you will find them and how they use them. For example, two people who have a social profile on LinkedIn and Facebook can have very different behaviors in each social network.

Therefore, the product and service that you offer should help you decide where to best promote your content. If you work in interior design, it’s obvious that Pinterest is the first network you should be in, without forgetting about Instagram and Facebook, due to the importance that these social networks give to pictures and visual objects. This doesn’t mean that Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus won’t allow you to attract traffic as well, but they don’t seem to be the networks where you will get the most followers, right?

Apart from the basic concepts mentioned above, an interesting way of better identifying in which social networks you should be is to look at where there’s ‘”more noise” on the keywords you have previously identified. To do so, you can use Buzzsumo, which allows you to introduce any term and tells you in which social networks it has been most popular. Ahrefs also allows you to analyze what the competitors are doing.

To sum up, analyze the characteristics of your target audience, compare them with those of each social network, and finally, confirm your hypothesis looking at your keywords.

However, it’s also possible that after the whole analysis you’re still not clear on what social networks you should focus to promote content and conclude that “the more you publish on all social networks, the better”. At this point you might start stressing out about all the work you have to do to promote your blog.

4. How can I easily promote my blog in almost all social networks?

We know you have limited resources and that it’s impossible to manage to do everything; we had the same problem. Creating high quality content and promoting it properly means a lot of hours of work. Good organization, thus, is critical for the whole process. What steps do we recommend?

Firstly, you should decide on the type of blog that suits your audience, the type of posts you want to write, and frequency at which to publish content.

Secondly, and very important, create an editorial calendar of your posts at least a month in advance. At first this might be a bit daunting, and you might feel you waste a lot of time deciding what to write. But I can tell you that in the long term it’ll be worth it, since once it’s done, the “obligation” of following the calendar is perfect to fulfill the objectives you have set yourself.

Thirdly, write the posts of your blog in advance to make sure they’re ready to be published on the date and time of your calendar.

Fourth, promote the posts in all social networks once they have been published. How??Very simple: using Nelio Content. With this plugin you will manage to improve your productivity and the traffic to your site, since it will allow you to prepare the different actions of promotion on social networks from the WordPress Dashboard.

Oh, right… you’ll be thinking, here comes the publicity…? Let me explain it based on our own experience.

At Nelio we are a team of only three partners and, even still, we have developed several plugins, we take care of any incidence or doubt that may arise from the users, we find the time to keep training ourselves and be up to date and, as part of what implies having a business, we ourselves do all the marketing actions to promote our brand and products. And amongst many other actions, I also include that of planning, creating, and promoting our content.

How does Nelio Content help us in all of this? In the following way:

1. Two months in advance, we always decide our editorial calendar. This might take us a couple of hours of work.

   

2. Each author (one of us three) knows what they have to do each week, maximum one post to write. Some of them can take a couple of hours to write. Others, one day or longer.
3. In any case, at the same time we write a post, we create all the messages that will be published to promote that post. Add a maximum of 10 minutes to the previous elaboration of the post.

   

4. And that’s it! On the planned date, not only it will publish the post, but also, the promotion on each social network will be automatically done. Isn’t it wonderful?

I suppose that from a productivity perspective, it’s clear we have saved a lot of time.

Let’s look at the results now.

As you know, increasing the traffic of your website isn’t something you can achieve overnight, but little by little, we started seeing our progress:

On the previous graph, the jump between June and July corresponds to the merge of the blogs. Before merging our sites, we set ourselves the objective, within our marketing plan, to reach around 12,500 additional visits per month in six months (adding all the visits to our blogs). Up until now, 4 months in, we have already managed to increase 10,000 visits per month. Oh! And I want to leave it clear that we’re not doing any type of revenue-per-click campaign.

But this is not it. Before merging our blogs, from the different channels of traffic acquisition, the social media one did not reach 3%. Currently, 5.7% of the traffic comes from social networks; we have gone up by 3 points in 4 months and we’re getting very close to the interval of 6% to 9% that I mentioned at the beginning of the post.

Conclusion

Getting traffic to your website is not a quick or easy task. The quality and frequency of publication is possibly what will help you the most to increase the traffic. But be aware that the promotion on social networks is a channel of acquisition that shouldn’t be ignored. Furthermore, the SEO is also affected by it in a positive way, since there will be more links to your website.

What are you waiting for to increase the traffic to your site?

Featured image by Anthony Delanoix.