How to Increase Social Media Referrals to Your Website

SocialMediaExaminer's 2014 survey corroborated the finding. Ninety-two percent of social media marketers who participated in the survey said social media marketing increased their reach and traffic. With focused efforts on social media, you can grow your business.

The following are five ways to increase social media referrals to your website.

1. Install social sharing widgets

One of the easiest ways to increase referrals to your website, is by installing share widgets or plugins. The easier it is for people to share your content, the more likely they are to do it, and the more exposure your content will get. Further, people are more influenced by content shared by their friends. By enabling website visitors to share content, you can increase conversions.
 
Tools like SumoMe offer social share plugins with counters on them. Counters prompt even more shares, because of social validation. People are more comfortable sharing content that others have already shared.

Many websites prefill tweets and use tweetables within their articles, driving even more shares.

2. Set evergreen content on auto-post

According to a Moz case study, evergreen content can have sustained success and continue to drive traffic years after its original date of publication. That's the potential that evergreen content has, provided that it is promoted consistently. Unfortunately, most marketers create posts, share them once or twice and then forget about them.
 
If you are concerned about forgetting to set up promotions or cannot dedicate time every day to do it, you can set them up in advance. I add my evergreen posts to DrumUp's content libraries and set them on auto-post, so they are automatically shared on my different social accounts at a frequency of my choosing.
 

Alternatively, you can use any of the popular social media management tools and manually set up promotions for weeks or months in advance.

3. Optimize social media images

Visuals are the future of content marketing, but simply sharing them on social media won't give you results. The quality and presentation of your visuals matter. Ideally, you should optimize them to fit each social media platform. Cover photos, profile pictures and feed images are different in dimensions, on each social media platform.
 

Here's a cheat sheet that can help.

4. Participate in trending conversations

Conversations on social networks sometimes go viral, and when they do, they have thousands of pairs of eyes on them. Savvy marketers know that this is a great time to make an impression and increase brand exposure. Facebook and Twitter are particularly useful for this strategy. They display trending hashtags and topics prominently on their platforms, prompting people to participate in and view them.

The more relevant the conversations are to your brand, the better the benefit of participating in them. For instance, if yours is an app development company, you should have a say in tech related developments and trends.

5. Contests and incentives

Why should fans share your content? Understand their motivations. Give them reasons to share. Incentives and contests give fans more reason to participate and interact with brands. Qwertee is a T-shirt brand with a great Facebook presence. They built it on the back of one smart idea - the free T-shirt contest. Participants are required to like their page and share their email in exchange for a chance at winning one of 1000 T-shirts the brand gives away each week.
 
The contest not only puts a spotlight on the brand's great design, but earns them referrals and leads in the process.

If you aren't able to run an independent contest, you could use Woobox. It helps create photo contests, quizzes, sweepstakes and a bunch of other contest types.

Refer On

Social media referrals form an important part of your website conversions and your business. By focusing your effort on increasing them, you can dramatically affect your current performance.