Just like most marketers, I have my bag of tricks – ones that I’ve been leveraging that most people have not. I still use them because they work extremely well.
So, what’s in this bag of tricks? As you read on, know that these tactics will work for you. No matter what industry you are in or whether your website is new or well-established, they will help you generate more traffic.
Here are 7 unique social media tactics that will drive you more traffic:
Tactic #1: Add tweetable quotes throughout your blog posts
One of my most popular blog posts on Quick Sprout was a post on business advice, in which I broke down business advice in 3 words.
I hate to say it, but the post wasn’t that good. The reason it did well was because I made quotes and phrases from that blog post tweetable. You could tweet every piece of advice I gave with just a click.
It was so successful that the post generated 17,452 visits from Twitter alone.
You too can do this. You’ll find that you’ll get more social media traffic from this strategy than just adding a “tweet this” button at the bottom of your blog post.
With some basic HTML, you can add this to your site. Here is an example of the code I used:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=%22dont+give+up.%22+and+more+3-word+business+advice+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FcOIHxm”>tweet</a>
Tactic #2: Create a LinkedIn group
You may have noticed that I’ve become heavily involved with LinkedIn over the last few months. I even recently created a group called Marketing Leaders of America.
Why? Because LinkedIn is currently my number one source of social traffic. For every 5,000 members you have within your group, you can roughly generate 15,000 visitors.
You can announce your latest blog post to your entire list, just like you would with an email blast. This feature is called an “Announcement” on LinkedIn.
You only want to do such group blasts once a month, or else you will burn your group out.
You’ll notice that every time you send an announcement, you get a quick spike in traffic of a few thousand visitors.
They will start sharing your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, which will generate more visitors to your site in the following 48 hours. In essence, you’ll generate 3 visitors for every group member you add, assuming you are sharing good content with the group.
This strategy has been working so well that I started buying up all of the popular marketing groups on LinkedIn.
If you are creating a group from scratch, make sure you have the word “leader” within it. Why? Because who doesn’t want to be considered a leader?
Once you create a group, invite all of your connections to join it. Then, post great content on a daily basis, and you’ll notice the number of members you have will start increasing day by day. Just make sure some of the content you publish is phrased as a question, e.g., “describe what social media means to you in 2 or fewer words.”
Tactic #3: Repost infographics with stats
When we first released the KISSmetrics blog, my business partner did something really smart.
He found good infographics from around the web and re-posted them on our blog. Sure, there is nothing unique about that, but the way he promoted each infographic was unique.
He would add unique content above the infographic and then take all of the stats from the inforgraphic and make them tweetable. You can see an example of this here.
All we had to do was tweet the infographic from our account, which typically generated 20 or so re-tweets. Those re-tweets would generate further tweets, which caused a chain reaction and gave us an extra 200+ tweets.
I’ve known about this tactic for years, but I’ve rarely used it. It’s been so effective for us that I’m going to start using it again every Friday when I release infographics on Quick Sprout.
Tactic #4: Get your employees to promote your social profiles
Whether you have your own company or you work for one, chances are you work with other people. So, why not leverage everyone’s social profiles to promote the business?
My co-founder as well as my team members do this with their profiles on Twitter. As you can see, we mention our company’s @username within our bios.
We also do this with our Facebook fan pages. Every person of our company joins them. Why? Because they are more likely to “like” something that comes from the company they work for versus a random piece of content.
This causes our engagement-per-fan ratio to skyrocket, which helps increase the number of people who see our company’s content within their feeds. It’s been so effective that it helped us generate an extra 19% more visits from Facebook, which isn’t too bad considering we don’t even have 100 employees within our company.
Tactic #5: Tweet for an e-book
Whether you are releasing a white paper or an e-book, a great way to generate more downloads is to make users pay with a tweet. If they want to read the material you are offering, they’ll have to tweet it.
We tested this with a white paper on sales. We asked users to either give us their email addresses or tweet about the white paper in order to read it. We’ve also tested this approach with dozens of e-books.
We used a service called Pay with a Tweet as I have little to no development skills. The results so far have been pretty good. For every 5 people that tweeted about the white paper, we got 3 additional tweets from people seeing it on Twitter.
If you want to generate more traffic from Twitter, consider creating an e-book or a guide and making your users pay with a tweet. It’s an effective strategy, and you’ll find that people won’t have an issue tweeting about your business.
Tactic #6: Collect email addresses through Facebook authentication
Have you ever wondered why I collect email addresses on Quick Sprout? It’s because it is one of my most popular traffic acquisition channels. Emails generate in excess of 83,000 visitors a month for me.
You already know that offering a free e-book or a guide in exchange for an email address is a great way to collect them. You can use opt-in fields in your sidebar or beneath your blog posts, or you can test pop-ups.
But one thing you probably haven’t played with is collecting email addresses using Facebook authentication. Through Aweber, your visitors can give their email addresses with a click of a button, assuming they are logged into Facebook.
The Facebook authentication tactic helped increase our opt-in rate by 36.1% when we tested it on the KISSmetrics blog. If you are interested in leveraging this tactic, just follow the steps in this blog post.
Tactic #7: Leverage influencers
One of the best strategies I’ve used to build a blog audience is interviewing influencers. Every niche has its own experts.
If you can interview these experts, get their feedback on one issue, and then publish a giant blog post with their opinions, you’ll get more social shares than ever before.
Here is what you need to do:
- Create a list of over 100 experts in your space. Not everyone will participate, but your goal should be to get at least 50 people to accept.
- Come up with a question to ask these experts. Each expert should receive the same question.
- Email 10 experts asking them if they would like to participate in a group roundup. Make sure you give them a deadline for their responses. Let them know that you will link to their websites.
- After you have a few experts who are on board, email the rest. When emailing the rest of the group, make sure you mention the names of the people who are already planning on participating. This will help increase your response rate.
- Once you’ve published your post, make sure you email all of the participants asking them to share the post on the major social networks. Make it easy for them by giving them suggestions on what to tweet or share on Facebook.
That’s all it takes to leverage influencers. It’s not rocket science. It’s just time consuming. I
Conclusion
I rarely share my bag of tricks. I hope you’ll leverage these ones because they work. None of these tactics require a developer, so you should be able to do them on your own. 🙂
Give them a whirl, and let me know what you think. If you are having a hard time leveraging any of them, leave a comment, and I’ll be glad to help you out.
What other social media tricks do you think are worth leveraging?
