Social media is an essential part of your website promotion strategy. Whether you’re looking to gain more fans, build brand awareness or drive sales, it’s key to reach users on social networks and keep them coming back to your website for more.
In this article, you will find out more about the importance of a social strategy and tools which can help lift the load on a daily basis.
Table of Contents
Why social is important
Social media is where people gather on the internet to have fun, share interests and find out what’s going on. It’s where people spend their time online, where trends are formed, and, ultimately, where buying decisions are made.
Daily social media use averages around 135 minutes per day. That’s over two hours out of an average of just 16 hours awake.
Social media trends are so important to brands, that social media stars such as Zoella are estimated to make around £14,000 per post for sponsored content.
Online retailers can easily mine their data to see the importance of social media on buying decisions. Retailer Amazon has expanded its own social media influencer program to include Youtube.
By leveraging social media, website owners are reaching pools of internet users, tapping into trends and leveraging those social buying decisions.
Mobile First
Making your website social media friendly also helps you to be mobile friendly.
According to Google, over half of internet usage is via mobiles and devices, and many of these users access the internet through apps rather than browsers.
So, if you want to make it easy for users to find and navigate your site, you’ll need your content to show up in their mobile device, directly within their social media app. This way, audiences can get to your content using just their right thumb.
Traffic Matters
According to SEO experts, including Roy Hinkis at Similar Web, the number of visitors to your website is used as a metric when search engines rank websites. This is also true of the amount of social shares your content receives.
If you want your content to be number one in search results for a particular topic, consider that you may first need to build your traffic from social media, with a carefully considered social strategy.
By reaching the right audience with relevant and engaging content, you’ll be rewarded with a better search engine ranking, which in turn will deliver more visitors to your site.
Strategising
Think about audience
Each social media channel has its own demographic and you may want to tailor your approach depending on the platform. According to BI Intelligence, Facebook is the most popular network, LinkedIn attracts high-income users, SnapChat has a younger audience. It’s worth spending some time on finding your target audience and thinking about how you want your website content to reach them.
Once you’ve decided which channels to grow and how to approach them, there are tools which can help to connect your website with those audiences.
A picture says a thousand words
When you write for social, make sure you include an image which is at least 200 x 200 pixels. This will ensure you get a picture included when you share on most channels and increases your chances of getting those all important likes, shares and clicks.
Buffer
Buffer is a great tool for managing sharing across multiple social media channels. Tailor different messages, schedule posts or just write a single message to share across all your profiles in one go.
Check the impact with Google Analytics
There’s always room to improve and experiment. It’s a good idea to check the impact your social strategy is having by checking Google Analytics or your other reporting software.
Look at “Sources” to see where views came from and see which posts were popular with each channel.
If you find that your Facebook network goes wild for dog pictures on a Friday afternoon, or the Twitterverse just loves the how-to pieces on a Tuesday morning, you’ll have a better idea of how to target and time your content in the future.
Pick different headlines and messages for each platform and time the shares to make sure you reach your audience at the right time. Re-sharing in this way means that just because your fans weren’t online when you hit publish, they won’t miss out on their favourite content.
A versus B
If you really want to learn more about reaching your audience with social media, try A versus B testing on your social media posts. Buffer explains more here.
Be more sociable
For help implementing your social media strategy, and integrating your website and social tools, get in touch with Silicon Dales today.