Increasing Your Social Media Traffic To Boost Your Blog

Blogging and social media go hand in hand.

It is a simple fact that a blog cannot survive without a social media presence. Of course you need to avoid certain mistakes and make sure you are doing it correctly in order for it to be beneficial.

Aside from giving you a medium to connect with your readership, the biggest benefit of being active on social media and finding ways to market yourself online is generating traffic for your blog.

This helps it to gain authority and move up higher in the search engine results pages. The big question that everyone is asking, though, is how do you grow your audience on social media in order to increase traffic to your blog?

Increasing Your Social Media Traffic To Boost Your Blog

Consider Your Content

You need to post engaging, quality content.

You cannot simply share “published a new blog post” across all of your social media platforms. That is purely promotional and gives no added value to your audience.

For your content to be well-engaged with, or for content to go viral, it needs to be well timed and to elicit a response from your audience.

Whether that response is to laugh and click like or share, or it is something more immersive such as clicking through and reading the blog post – usually some kind of emotional response helps to promote action.

Optimize Your Profiles

Taking the time to optimize your social media profiles is a small thing that can make a big difference. Instead of just putting your name and Twitter handle down in your profile, include what you do and what you post about.

This will give people a much better idea of the niche you serve and the type of content that you post about. Some people might start following you just because you are in a niche that is relevant to them.

Engage with Others

Engaging with others includes following other users, responding to questions and comments, or merely saying thank you for a re-tweet, like, or share. Try to share other people’s content as well, and mention them when re-posting content – give credit where credit is due.

A simple “thanks for sharing” can go a long way.

If, on the other hand, you merely promote your blog over social media and never respond to your followers’ comments and questions, you can’t be surprised when your following drops drastically.

No one wants to be bombarded by promotional material and no one follows someone on social media who is using the medium entirely for self-promotion.

Reach Into Your Wallet

In order to compete in the big world of Facebook, you will have to loosen your purse strings. You have most likely heard of the changes to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm that seems to have limited peoples’ reach on the network.

The only way around this – aside from good quality, engaging content as was previously mentioned – is to pay for Facebook Ads in order to remain visible in the newsfeed.

Although, it helps to know that Facebook favors certain content; this analysis, by Sotrender, shows that reach for media content remains consistent throughout the day, whereas reach for brand content decreases significantly after each post.

This is because the media content adds valuable, news-worthy content into the news feed; after all, they don’t call it a newsfeed for nothing. Brand content, on the other hand, is purely promotional and Facebook doesn’t want this bombarding users and cluttering the newsfeed.

Plus, they realize that brands use social media for marketing, and they know that they can charge a premium for this marketing service. Which leads us back to opening up your wallet.

If your content isn’t deemed to be media content, you will have to invest in Facebook ads to grow your reach and increase your traffic and engagement.

Consistency is Key

We’ve mentioned this before, but we will say it again – it’s detrimental to your social media following if you aren’t maintaining your activity. Most people start fully-energized and engaged, but will fizzle out when neglected.

One of the biggest tricks with social media is to plan a posting schedule and stick to it. In the end, quality is better than quantity, so if you don’t have a lot of time to invest into your social media accounts, it’s much better to be consistent with one post a day than to post five on one day and then nothing the next

One thing that can make managing your posts much easier is to use a scheduling tool.

Something like Hootsuite or Buffer allow you to schedule posts over multiple social networks so that you can keep on top of it all. They offer analytical insights into your networks as well.

Analyze Your Data

That brings us to the last point – analyze your data! You can have a great social media marketing plan, a good posting schedule, and engage your audience faithfully, but unless you are analyzing your data, you won’t know if it’s actually working in practice.

By seeing your follower engagement and seeing what content has been performing best, you can see what your audience likes and is responding to, the times they were viewing it, and many other aspects which can help you understand what type of content you should be posting and when you should be posting it.

This helps you to refine and produce better content that will be better received.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you very much for reading. We hope these few tips on how to go about increasing your social media traffic to boost your blog have been helpful to you and if you have any questions, be sure to ask them down below in the comment section.

Since you’ve made it this far, I’d also like to invite you to download my free ebook, “How To Win At Affiliate Marketing” for you to be able to understand how to make money with your blog (once you give it this boost).

Thanks again for reading, and if you’re in the mood to read a bit more on blogging, be sure to check out our recent articles.

Looking forward to seeing you WIN!

Chris Lee