Your website is the face of your organization and your storefront for many companies today. As the place to find information about your company, browse products or services, or make a purchase, your website provides leads, customers, and clients with the resources they need. Many marketing efforts are required to drive traffic. Today we review social media strategies.

Social media is a great tool to drive traffic to your website and create customer brand engagement. As a direct line of communication between you and your target audience, social media allows you to grab your audience’s attention and push them through to your site to view more content or explore a new piece.

Here are some ways to improve social media engagement.

Attract Influencers

When you’re sharing content on social media, it helps to have some help from trusted and respected audience members. These individuals, known as influencers, can help get your content in front of a larger, more trusting audience. They provide third-party endorsement and are viewed as trusted advisers.

Reach out to them and ask them to share your content, post their content in return. Over time this will build followers, likes and engagement.

Include a Click and Call to Action in Your Posts

In order to improve your traffic through social platforms, you want to improve the number of shares you’re getting on social media. When you’re able to get your community engaging with your content, they can get their own friends, family, and followers talking about your company as well. However, in order to get the conversation started, you need to make it interesting, unique, authentic and provide a reason to engage further.

Providing next steps about reading an article, viewing a video, taking advantage of a special offer are all a means to gain shares and engagement.

Not all Social Media Platforms are Effective

Know your audience. Not all social media platforms are effective for every industry and organization. For instance, any food and beverage organization will benefit from Instagram. Food is the number one shared image on Instagram because people eat with their eyes.

Tourism clients do better on Facebook and Instagram than Twitter. Why? Because these platforms allow for elaborate storytelling, multiple images and videos.

Organizations that need to communicate valuable information should consider Twitter where ideas are shared.  Twitter also works better for broadcast than engagement.

Either way all allow immediacy of communication. Need to close suddenly – don’t forget to post it on all your platforms. Consumers today know to look there for the latest information.

Create a Conversation

Social media works best when it’s about engagement, not just broadcast. While social media can be a great place for sharing this information, it needs to be done in the right context. Without some idea of what your content is about, you’re not going to get anyone to click through.

When sharing links to your website on social media, you want to include them in a conversation as much as possible. Whether you start a conversation by encouraging your fans, friends, and followers to go to a blog post or view a piece of content you post or your link in response to another individual’s post, creating a conversation can help your links fit more naturally.