Hopefully you're not trying to grow your Instagram following just because you want more followers – you probably want more followers because they want more clients / customers / blog readers / subscribers / etc. If you're a blogger (or business with a blog), using social media is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your website – so in this post, we’re sharing 10 ways to use social media to grow your blog traffic.
How to use social media to grow your blog traffic
You may be already sharing your blog posts on social media, but just because you're posting on Instagram or Facebook or wherever you are active – that doesn't automatically translate into blog traffic. Using social media effectively to grow your blog traffic requires having a strategy!
- Share your blog posts multiple times – Your followers aren't going to see every single post so it's TOTALLY fine to share them multiple times! For example you could share a sneak peek before you publish a new blog post, then share an Instagram post the day your blog post is live, then share about the post on Instagram stories, then repurpose the post into a reel or chat with your audience about it on Instagram live. The more you share the more opportunities you have to grow your blog traffic. If you have image-heavy blog posts, you could even share multiple Instagram posts promoting your new blog post or create a carousel of images from your post. We also love doing a Sunday roundup of all the new content we shared throughout the week as not everyone sees things the first time you share it!
- Use specific calls to action – If you want to increase the number of times people click through to your blog from Instagram then you need to regularly tell them to click the link in your profile. Just adding “link in profile” at the end of your captions isn't enough. People aren't on Instagram scrolling through and looking for a reason to leave Instagram – so you need to give them a reason to leave if you want them to take action. Tell them WHY they should click on the link in your profile – what's in it for them – if you really want to entice them to click through. Here are more tips on what to post on Instagram to market your business!
- Post often and at optimal times – This could be said for other social media platforms as well, but it's especially true for a high-volume, low-converting platform like Twitter. Because the average “lifespan” of a tweet is less than half an hour, if you're only tweeting a couple times a day, only a small percentage of your followers are actually seeing your posts. This is a great post explaining in more detail why people aren't seeing your tweets, but the keys to seeing any real traffic from twitter are posting multiple times a day, every day, and tweeting during the periods when your audience is most likely to actually see those tweets. Using a social media scheduler like SmarterQueue can ensure that you are tweeting at optimal times even when you can't actually be “active” on Twitter all the time.
- Use click to tweets in your blog posts – Getting other people to share your blog posts on Twitter can grow your blog traffic even more than you sharing your own posts on Twitter, so you want to make it easy for people to share! Using social sharing plugins like SumoMe or Social Warfare can increase your social shares, but adding in easy click to tweet quotes within your blog post is another great way to increase Twitter shares in particular.
- Take advantage of Facebook groups – Facebook may not be our favorite social media platform but utilizing Facebook groups can make a significant difference in driving traffic to your blog. There are lots of different types of Facebook groups no matter what your niche is – and many of them allow for promotion of your blog posts. There are some groups created specifically for helping bloggers promote their posts (“share for share” type groups) and others where promos are only allowed on certain days or in certain threads. Make sure you pay attention to group rules before you start promoting your blog posts! The easiest way to find relevant groups to join is to search for keywords on Facebook – so for example, you could search “beauty blogger” if you're a beauty blogger or “entrepreneur” if you're looking for groups with other entrepreneurs.
- Utilize eye-catching graphics – Regardless of whether you share sharing your blog posts on your Facebook page or in relevant Facebook groups, you can tease you blog post content with a short intro but also make sure to include a graphic to catch your audience's attention. If you have images in your blog post, Facebook will automatically include one of the images when you share your link unless you click the option to display images, but if you want to share a different image, you can upload another photo/video instead! Text-only posts on Facebook are easy to scroll past, but adding a graphic helps you post to stand out in your audience's feed.
- Treat it like a search engine – Pinterest may be considered a social media platform, but it’s really more of a visual search engine. It’s our favorite social media platform for driving traffic to this blog and there are so many great Using keywords in your Pinterest bio, your board descriptions, and your individual pin title and descriptions helps other people find your content when they are searching for particular topics on Pinterest.
- Join Tailwind Tribes – Pinterest group boards are a great way to get more expose, but our favorite way for getting our pins seen by more people is through Tailwind tribes. Tailwind is the best Pinterest scheduler and we’ve used it for years to make sure we are pinning consistently and at the best times. There are Tailwind Tribes for almost every niche and if they are open to new contributors, they will have instructions on how you can join. When you join Tailwind Tribes, make sure you're paying attention to the Tribe rules, the quality of the pins being shared, and the re-pin rates – if the quality / engagement is low then it's probably not a tribe worth joining.
Any social media
- Create a schedule – For any social media marketing (or really, any marketing in general), having a schedule can help ensure that you are consistently using each platform. Since we schedule most of our social media posts in advance, we’re able to stick to a regular schedule and always post our best content at the best times for my audience.
- Pay attention to analytics – In order to know the “best” when / where / what of posting on social media for your audience, you need to pay attention to analytics. Not just what google tells you is the “best time to post” – the best time to post for YOU is when YOUR audience is active. “Popular” posts are only relevant if they are popular among your audience – so pay attention to your analytics and do more of what works and less of what doesn't.
So these are 10 actionable ways to use social media to increase your blog traffic – and they're all totally free! Keeping up with social media can be a lot of work, but here are 5 ways to save time on social media to help you out!
What other other ways are you using social media to grow your blog traffic?
