WHY MORE SOCIAL MEDIA TRAFFIC
is important for
your Business?
Social media has become one of the most important aspects of smart digital marketing. It provides an opportunity for businesses to reach millions of prospective customers worldwide. In fact, 90% of small business owners say their social media marketing (SMM) strategies have tremendously increased their business exposure. Therefore, understanding why social media marketing is important for your small businesses or startup will enhance your digital marketing efforts.
Social media traffic refers to the number of people who visit your pages. Usually, traffic is measured in terms of the number of unique visitors to your particular social media platform over a given period of time — daily, weekly, monthly, or annually.
Why is more
traffic important?
To understand why you need more traffic to grow your business, let’s take a brief look at the online sales funnel. The sales funnel is a theoretical marketing model that illustrates the customer’s journey before buying a product.
Let say, the customer wants to buy a washing machine. She begins to do research to find the different brands available in the market and, over the course of doing research, she encounters your website or one of your social media pages.
She goes through your social media pages and other online platforms to understand your brand, your product, and your pricing. She also looks at customer reviews about your business. At the same time, she is looking at your competitor’s pages and online platforms. Eventually, she reaches a conclusion and narrows down to either buy from you or from your competitor.
The people who visit your pages are your leads. These leads become customers when they buy from you. Keep in mind that not all visitors that come to your page are going to buy from you. Therefore, the essence of having more traffic to your platform is to get as many leads as possible so that your chances of making sales may increase.
Please note that, while merely having huge traffic is good, if the traffic is not well targeted, then it is counterproductive. For instance, if you sell construction materials, your conversion rate will be higher even if you have a smaller audience of homeowners, construction companies, and real estate agents than if you had a large following of college students.
Consequently, it would make more sense for you to focus on growing the traffic of your target audience
5 tips to increase your
social media traffic
Now that you know that more traffic is important, here are 5 tips to help you grow your social media traffic.
- Create relevant and valuable content for your target audience. As long as your followers and visitors find your content valuable, they will keep coming back for more and may even share and refer their friends to your platforms.
- Create more visual content. Studies show that visual content gets shared more than plain text content. Incorporate videos, GIFs, infographics, memes, and photos into your content creation strategy.
- Engage with your audience. Once you have shared your content, monitor the activity on the post regularly and respond to and interact with your audience.
- Post during the times when your audience is most active—you’ll be able to determine these times of day from your analytics reports. When you post at these peak hours, your posts get better visibility.
- Invest in social media advertising to expand your reach. With so many social media users on each platform who are constantly posting, your posts may not get in front of your target audience. Investing in social media advertising ensures your posts are treated with high-priority by the social media algorithm.
All social media platforms have metrics to measure how much traffic you are receiving on your pages. Most have become so sophisticated that you can tell the source of the traffic, the average time your visitors spend on your platforms, and the demographics of your visitors. Leverage this information to grow your target audience.
For more information about social media marketing for small businesses, please download the Become a Leader in Your Industry Using Social Media eBook here.