Mastering Social Media (3 of 3) - Moving Your Social Media Traffic to Your Website

If you’re using social media as a marketing tool, engagement with your profiles is nice, but traffic from your profiles to your website is better. In this third and final part of our Mastering Social Media series, we’ll discuss how to shift your social media followers’ attention directly to your website.

Why a Good Social Media Following Isn’t Enough

Consider why you last checked your Facebook. Chances are, it wasn’t strictly for business purposes. Since you’re a business representative targeting other business representatives, why would you believe that your targets are acting any differently?

The truth is, they aren’t.

Just like you, they’re on Facebook (and most other social media channels) to socialize and share their thoughts. They’re checking in on their family and friends or chuckling at a silly video. It is far less often that they visit a social media account to see what you have to say.

Once again consider your own behaviors on social media: if you were scrolling through your feed and happened to see a post that promised a benefit to your livelihood, wouldn’t that make you stop for a moment? Again, your audience is an awful lot like you, and while they may not be actively thinking about their business at a given time, it probably isn’t far from their mind. All it takes is a little reminder to open the floodgates.

This brings us to our second point: as valuable as social media is to your marketing, it probably isn’t the place where you’re going to convince your audience that you are the, the, provider for them. Frankly, it shouldn’t be… that’s what you have a website for. Social media is the place to cultivate the relationship that keeps them coming back to that website, while providing them with the means to do so, once they’re ready.

This means that you need to make sure that your social media presence does a few things.

What Your Social Media Needs to Do

In order to persuade your social media followers to visit your website, you need to deliver a few things: a reason to do so, and easy access to the website itself. 

A Reason

Here’s the thing… by nature, social media isn’t the best place to convert someone to a client. The kind of message you need to send, more often than not, seems out of place on these channels. Again, for most, social media is a place for two things: relationships and opinions. A hard-sell status update for one of your services is going to seem out of place sandwiched between a family member being political and a buddy from high school sharing an image of a sarcastic quote misattributed to a famous orange cat that hates Mondays and loves lasagna. Any hard-selling you attempt here is only going to seem out of place and unwelcomed.

Alternatively, if you use your social media to build up a relationship with your prospects, you have the opportunity to soft-sell your services to them, welcoming them to learn more when they’re ready to do so. By doing so, you reinforce the impression that you are more of a resource for them to lean on, instead of another vendor trying to make a sale, and are therefore someone they can trust to do right by them.

Of course, even a soft sell has to prove its value. While it is important that social media is a relationship-building tool for your business, you do need to make some reference to your services. However, that reference should be just that, a reference, a mere taste of the value that you have to offer. In other words, your social media should motivate your audience to want to learn more by visiting your website.

Easy Access

Once your social media followers are motivated to visit your website and learn more, they’re going to need an easy way to do so. Otherwise, that motivation is going to dissolve pretty quickly. To combat this unfortunate tendency, you need to make it as simple as possible for your audience to access your site from your social media pages.

There are a few ways to do this. First, you need to make sure that you include a link back to your business page on your profile page for each of your business social media accounts. After all, where are your interested followers first going to look for this information? Doing this allows you to claim a slice of the 31 percent of all referral traffic that social media generates.

Secondly, don’t be afraid to entice your audience by ending a post with an open-ended question or some other kind of cliffhanger, as long as you’re also providing the link to a satisfying conclusion or answer. While you don’t want your posts to become formulaic and irritating (“How can you solve “PROBLEM A” without interrupting “PROCESS B” or causing any further issues? FIND OUT HERE!”), you also don’t want to offer a potential solution to one of their pain points without any payoff. While not all of your social media activity should be so sales-forward, sprinkling a sales-centric post in every once in a while is a good move.

The balance you are trying to strike is one where your audience isn’t feeling pressured to visit your website, but they know that they’ll always be able to find a link to it.

As the saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.” The horse will decide when they’re ready, you just have to have your content stream prepared for it when it does.

Why Your Website and Social Media Need to Loop

As we discussed in the first piece of this series, it is also important that your targets are able to easily find you on social media. Consider this: what would happen if someone just so happened to click on your website once, read a ton of your content, and then was never seen nor heard from again? You’d have to assume that they had stumbled across another provider--possibly when looking for you again--and just stayed there this time.

However, if they had just so happened to have followed you on social media (maybe following a call-to-action that was included in some of that content that they read) this problem quickly becomes a non-issue. Remember, your website effectively serves as the cornerstone of your marketing, so you want to make sure that they are always able to return there.

Social media is just one of the many marketing tools we can help you with. Read our other blogs to learn more about your B2B marketing, and reach out to us at 888-546-4384 to find out how we can help to jumpstart your marketing efforts.