More Social Media Traffic: How to Bring Visitors to Your Pages

Is your company website or online store dead in the water?

Time to change that.

Social media opens up great opportunities to generate website visitors, effectively and cheaply. You just need to know how.

In this article, we’ll tell you

• how to use social networks as a traffic booster,
• what best practices you should follow on different platforms and
• how to analyze and optimize your strategy.

Social media as a source of traffic

Social networks are good traffic boosters for several reasons:

• You reach a large audience.
• You can interact with your target group and motivate them to visit your pages through text, images and videos.
• You have extensive analysis options at your disposal. You can use these to constantly review and refine your strategy.
• Targeted social media activities show results faster than search engine optimization and have a more lasting effect than Google Ads.
• Organic social media marketing in particular is also suitable for companies with a limited budget.

There are two approaches to generating traffic with social media:

• via paid content
• through organic marketing

While organic posts have a lasting effect and don’t cost any money, paid ads quickly bring visitors to your page. Ads also score points with options for precise targeting. You can achieve maximum success if you combine both approaches.

Effective ways to generate social media traffic

Link posts

Link posts are a direct method of directing users to your website.

For example, link to product pages or offers and increase the click rate with a short, concise description and a meaningful call-to-action.

Important: Communicate clear added value and use eye-catching images or videos.

Also good: a dose of humor and storytelling as in the following example:

On LinkedIn in particular, it is a good idea to attract visitors with blog articles or white papers.

Publishers link to their articles, but not without comment. Even if you are sure that your text has the perfect headline, you will achieve more impact if you write a post about it.

Good to know: Don’t overdo it with external links on LinkedIn. Although there is no evidence for the frequently made statement that link posts automatically achieve less reach, the LinkedIn algorithm and users reward it if your posts often offer direct added value and you don’t just use the platform as a traffic driver.

Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

With clear CTAs such as “Learn more”, “Read now” or “Go to offer”, you also motivate users to visit your site.

Tips:

• Keep your CTAs short and precise.
• Pay attention to simple, active wordings.
• Adapt the tone to the platform and your other content.

Ads and paid campaigns

With carefully crafted social media ads, you can reach the right target group and drive traffic to your website. Social networks offer detailed targeting options that allow you to address specific users and increase your traffic.

The advantages of ads: they achieve a high reach. This is particularly important in times when organic reach is declining.

Website links in the profile

Optimize your social media profile by linking your website prominently. Platforms such as LinkedIn or Instagram offer space for a link – use this space wisely, update the link regularly and refer to it in your posts.

Social media traffic: network-specific best practices

Instagram

Bio link

There are no link posts available on Instagram. This means for you: The link in your bio plays a central role.

But what if you want to redirect visitors to different pages? There are tools like Linktree or Bitly for this. These create a link that leads to your own landing page or a selection screen. You can store various links there. This method has the additional advantage that you don’t have to constantly change the link in your bio or in the bios of different platforms.

However, there is also a catch: tools such as Linktree are not data protection compliant. You are legally on the safe side if you create your own landing page on which you link relevant content or use a data protection-compliant tool such as Wonderlink.

Links in Stories

Instagram Stories offer a second option for linking to Instagram. In the past, only accounts with at least 10,000 followers could post a link here. Today, everyone can. All you have to do is select the link sticker and enter the desired URL.

The same applies here: make users want to click. For example, post an emotionally strong product photo.

Facebook

Facebook offers several options to generate traffic:

• Publish link posts.
• Join industry-relevant groups, publish content with added value and, if appropriate, post links to your online presence.
• Promote events on Facebook.

Meta ads for Instagram and Facebook

With the Meta Ads Manager, you can place ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. If you primarily want to generate more traffic, the campaign objective “Traffic” is a good choice – easy to remember.

Tip: Just because an ad costs money and achieves a high reach doesn’t automatically mean it will be clicked on a lot. Good content also makes the difference here. Videos in particular stand out.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is particularly suitable for B2B marketers. Regular posts with links to blog articles or white papers and an optimized company profile direct potential customers to your page. The same applies to LinkedIn Ads.

As on Facebook, groups on LinkedIn are a great format to create awareness for your company and your websites. This can include creating your own groups.

Pinterest

People use Pinterest primarily to discover products, brands, and ideas. Because they actively search for new things, the platform is also suitable as a traffic generator for previously unknown brands.

The so-called Rich Pins achieve a particularly high reach. They are characterized by your website automatically updating the information they contain.

There are currently three types of Rich Pins:

• Recipe Rich Pins for recipes.
• Article Rich Pins for blog articles and co.
• Product Rich Pins for products.

You can learn more about rich pins and how to create them in our guide to selling on Pinterest.

Ads are also available on Pinterest. Promoted Video Pins are very effective.

Monitoring success and optimization through analyses

You can measure the performance of your social media activities and other traffic sources with tools such as Google Analytics and in-platform insights.

Important: Use UTM parameters. These are small text fragments that you attach to links. This allows you to track how much traffic is generated via social media and how much from which campaign.

When analyzing, ask yourself questions like the following:

• Which platform does the most social traffic come from?
• Which campaigns are particularly successful?
• Which formats and content work well, which less so?

Experiment with different CTAs, for example.

Social media marketing ensures more visitors and more customers

Whether link posts, ads, or Pinterest Rich Pins, with the right measures on social media, you can increase the number of visitors to your website. You can also improve the quality of your traffic by attracting users with content that is tailored to their needs.

This usually works best when you combine organic marketing with ads. However, with the right strategy, you will also notice a difference if you don’t have a budget for ads at the moment.

One final tip: For quality traffic, choose the social media platforms where your target group hangs out. If you have different target groups, develop different strategies for LinkedIn and Instagram, for example.