If you’re tracking your website traffic with Google Analytics, social media is likely among the top listed traffic sources. For many blogs and websites, social media marketing may even be more important and telling than search engine traffic.

Unfortunately, many webmasters and business owners will ignore social media traffic, and miss out on maximizing these visits by turning them into conversions.

The truth is, the amount of traffic you manage to attract from social media and the level of engagement you manage to drive from it depends largely on how you structure your social media posts and the share worthiness your content.

So how do you capitalize on the traffic you attract from social media? Here are three things to include when creating a strategy for converting your social media traffic.

 

Expand Your Reach With Hashtags

If you’ve been on Twitter or Facebook at all, you’ve likely seen people use different hashtags in their social media posts. Hashtags expand your reach beyond just your immediate followers and fans and help you to reach new audiences. Using hashtags can significantly increase the reach of your social media content and help you to drive more targeted traffic to your website. When doing this, the traffic you drive from social media are on your website for a more targeted reason, and thus are likely more interested in services related to your field.

Make Sharing Easy to Encourage Social Proof

Social proof is the marketing tactic for easing the minds of worried customers. It comes in many forms: reviews, social status updates, side conversations, word-of-mouth marketing and more. Think about it: You’re more likely to trust and possibly do business with someone that has been vetted by a friend or colleague already. This is why social proof is such a key ingredient in your social media strategy.

Encourage readers to share your content with the people around them, which will encourage those followers to come to you with an understanding that you have been classified as a trusted source of information on this particular topic.

Happy customers are your best bet for word-of-mouth marketing. There’s no better time to leverage the social sharing potential of these customers than right after they purchase from you, so make sure that you are setup on Review sites and outlets for customers to leave you their excellent reviews.

Use Landing Pages

Landing pages are an inseparable part of the web browsing experience. And whether you conscious of the fact or not, you’ve likely visited a website landing page at one time or another. Whenever you click on an online ad, register for a webinar, download a survey or a white paper, it’s likely that a landing page facilitated your experience. It’s not surprising, then, that these types of pages are an essential tool for a marketer, as they help move the potential lead down the sales funnel, converting a website visitor into a lead or customer.

Elements of landing pages include a brief description of the offer, a call to action, and a preview of the product or service. In an ideal landing page, both the copy and the page design converge on a single purpose: to drive the customer to a specific action, such as downloading a white paper or registering for a webinar.

No matter what your social media strategy looks like, it can’t simply include ways to increase your website traffic. You must have tactics in place to maximize your traffic, and convert them into clients.