How to Drive Social Media Traffic as a New Blogger

Social media is now the most important means of communication. People use it to socialize with their communities, and brands take advantage of it to build sales funnel.

You, as a blogger, aren’t an exception and need to promote your posts on social media. If you want to get ahead of the competition on blogging, you can’t neglect the power of social media.

The thing is that when you are a beginner in blogging, social media is much more important for you, compared with famous bloggers.

In this article, we’re going to summarize the steps you need to take to drive social media traffic to your blog:

How to Get Social Media Traffic to Your Blog

1. Define clear objectives

The main goal of using social media is to drive traffic to your blog. However, you need to define clear objectives when you want to start your social presence.

For example, defining a certain number for followers, likes, comments, shares, and clicks would be a very good start. Also, you need to define deadlines for your objectives and milestones to measure your performance.

This can provide you with metrics to measure the quality of your social activities.

The more realistic objectives you define at the beginning, the better social management you can perform in the future. So, you’d better take into account your available resources such as budget, skills, and equipment.

2. Identify your niche audience

A well-targeted audience can help you to build a loyal community on social media and grow it by the day. Trying to get more and more followers without considering the relevancy is a mistake many beginners make.

The experience has proved that this approach can only work for a while and after that, you will face losing followers. Please avoid using black methods for gaining followers.

For example, Follow-Unfollow is a dirty trick that will lead to your account being blocked by social users. Also, using sketchy social apps to buy followers is another wrong way you need to avoid.

The best approach to get social media traffic is to reach out to the most relevant audience to your content. These users will follow your posts because they are interested in the context.

Try to define your audience and categorize them based on gender, location, age, position, etc. This can help you to find them on social media.

You can also use third-party apps like Kicksta to automate finding relevant accounts and convert them to your followers.

3. Choose the right social media platforms

After defining your audience, you need to track them on social media. There are more than 65 famous social media platforms with more than 3 billion active users all over the world.

Of course, you can’t create accounts on all of them and find your target audience. You need to know about the top social media platforms and more importantly the most relevant ones with your niche.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. are all among the top social media services you need to think of. But every one of them has its own characteristics and, therefore, its users can be different from others.

For example, LinkedIn is an employment-oriented service on which many professionals and job seekers have an account. A sample tool you can use on it is a LinkedIn post scheduler to help you with managing your weekly or biweekly uploads. 

Also, a majority of users on Pinterest are women. As another example, a lot of users on TikTok are youngsters and teenagers. So, you can’t just create an account on every social service and throw pictures, videos, or texts.

Try to prioritize social services, based on your knowledge about your niche, your audience, and different features of platforms. You need to get demographic and behavior statistics for your target audience and reach out to them accordingly.

Also, you can use social escrow services to acquire and customize social media accounts in order to save time.

Read also: How I Increased Pinterest Traffic by 778% in 2 Months

4. Promote your blog posts on social media

After creating your accounts on top social networks, you have to promote your blog posts on them and redirect your followers to your blog.

First, you have to implement social sharing buttons on your blog in order to get your readers to share your blog on their account.

Then, you’d better define a unique style on all your social media platforms. This will help your followers recognize you immediately when they see your posts on the feed.

If you want to build a long-lasting identity on social media, try to choose your color, font, tone of voice, and content strategy before embarking on that.

Using cross-linking can help you to save time and unify your posts on all social media platforms. In other words, you can use one social media account to promote your posts on another.

For example, you can define Linked Accounts on your Instagram account and add your Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Ameda, and other accounts to it. 

5. Schedule your posts

With a lot of social media platforms, social users do not have the time to check all posts on their feeds. So, you need timely posts to put your content in their eyes when they are online.

There is not a certain formula to find the best posting schedule. Generally, users will check their social accounts when they are free.

For example, before starting their job and after finishing it each day. The best posting time for getting social media traffic can vary by industry, location, age, gender, etc.

It is recommended to avoid posting more than once a day. It can decrease your engagement rates and also bother your followers. They don’t want to see your post every time they open their social service.

6. Use automation tools

As a blogger, you spend your time on writing compelling blogs and stories. So, you might face a lack of time when it comes to marketing on social media. Using social automation tools can make social marketing easier.

For example, WordPress Sharing provides a few services such as statistics in WordPress and the sharing feature to automate social sharing.

Also, there are plenty of apps like Crowdfire, Buffer, and Dlvr.it that can greatly help you to manage your social presence and simplify sharing your blog posts.

Read also: How I Grew My Blog to 78,000 Page Views Using Tailwind

7. Leverage the power of hashtags

Just like blogs that need SEO to increase the visibility of the posts, social posts require techniques to increase the chance of appearing in the search results, which leads to getting social media traffic.

Hashtags were first introduced on Twitter and now are at the core of searching algorithms of all social media platforms. The number one way to increase the exposure of your content on social media is to use the right hashtags.

Try to create two sets of hashtags: industry-specific hashtags and branded hashtags.

Careful use of these two sets of hashtags can greatly help your posts to be seen in the search results on social media. Branded hashtags are usually used in the profile and the other one under posts and stories.

8. Use your links everywhere you can

Clicks are one of the most important metrics on social media. You need to use your links whenever you can to increase the conversion rate and drive traffic to your blog.

For example, Instagram allows you to put your link in the bio and also as Swipe-Up links in stories.

On the other hand, the only means of adding a clickable link to your Instagram posts is by payment! You might need to switch to your business profile to be able to use all these features.

Read also: 5 Features You May Have Never Considered in Your Blogging

9. Utilize user-generated content

Your blog posts might not be enough for your social presence because you need to post at least one time per day. Although repeating your evergreen content in different formats can be a very useful strategy, you can’t rely solely on it.

One of the most effective ways in this regard is to ask your followers to create content for you. That’s user-generated content. Sharing your followers’ posts can greatly help you to gain their trust and increase the chance of getting more shares.

When your followers see their posts on your account, they will be encouraged to visit your site and also inviting their friends to do it as well.

10. Collaborate with niche influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the most useful means of building brand awareness and gaining more followers.

Micro and Nano-influencers who have respectively less than 50,000 and 5,000 followers are the most recent kinds of influencers on social media. Unfortunately, many of them are fake and just want to trade their Instagram account, based on a report by Social Tradia.

Using social tools like Awario and BuzzSumo to find niche influencers are recommended. They usually sort numerous influencers in terms of gender, location, industry, and followers in their database and can help you to find the right one.

Putting your link in their bio can significantly increase the social media traffic of your site. So, try to build a long-lasting relationship with them.

We described the process of driving social traffic to your blog. Of course, you need more experience in this way.

Every marketer has his/her own strengths and weaknesses, and you are not an exception. Try to find the best performing posts of your social accounts using analytics tools. This can help you to optimize your activities and increase the traffic of your blog.