When I started Blogging it was often told to me that social media is the best and most effective way to generate traffic for your website or blog. While this has proven itself true in my case, I want to clear some things up. Many people go to Twitter and Facebook to generate traffic; I did the same when I started. I was in the beginning stages of blogging. During that time I was even using a free hosting site. I learned something though that I want to share with you. Twitter does not produce results like Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media platforms. Read further to find out why, how you can counter this, and what to do to bring traffic to your website from social media platforms.
As a "baby" blogger I used Twitter solely to generate traffic to my blog. I posted links to my posts, asked people for re-tweets and favorites. I thought that because I had nearly 2000 followers I would get a lot of traffic for this. Boy was I wrong. This is not to say that results like mine apply to everyone. If you are more popular on Twitter than I was you could definitely get some leads. This article however is for the people who do not have millions of followers and do not have the time to get a million followers.
Twitter doesn't generate as much traffic as other platforms for 3 main reasons. The first of which is that your tweets get buried in peoples feeds. Most people are following hundreds even thousands of other Twitter users. And all these users are posting. So when you post a tweet how long do you think that tweet stays in a place where it will be noticed by the followers? The answer is about 2 minutes. When you post you have about 2 minutes for each of your followers to notice your post and follow said link to your website. Now if you have 2000 followers as I did, only a couple hundred on Twitter at a given time possibly less. Out of these hundred how many are going to notice and click your link? Less than 50 in most case in other cases absolutely none. Disappointing? The second reason is character limit. You have 140 characters to write a catchy line or two and post your link. Of course you will likely use a platform to shrink your link to allow more space for your catchy lines but how much does that really leave you? If your link is shrunken you have the amount of characters in this sentence to catch your reader's attention and get some traffic. That however is providing that your link is 10 characters or less. For most of us normal people catching someone's attention in that space will be very difficult. So theoretically let's say you can't come up with the most eye-catching lines. You just posted to your 2000 followers, of which about 200 will see this post. Your lines are only slightly catchy. We go from 50 potential clicks to 10. Our final reason for Twitter not generating traffic is the fact that people are always throwing links in their posts. If you have ever been on Twitter it is unlikely you can scroll through 10 tweets without at least 3 of them containing a link. How often are these links spam? Well that depends on who you follow. But let's say your followers get a lot of links thrown at them. No one really has time to go through all of those links. So your followers pick the ones that best suit their interests and have a catchy line with it. If your line isn't catchy you just eliminated half of those 10 potential clicks. That leaves you with 5 views. This is just an example. You case may lead to more views or less. I am just showing you how this works.
Now you might be wondering well how do I counter this on Twitter? The answer is you don't, at least not on Twitter. If you are looking to generate traffic head over to Pinterest and Facebook, you can of course still use Twitter. I still use Twitter for branding. I post links to my blog often and let people know what I'm writing about. What I don't do is try generating traffic from said tweets. Facebook is my main source of social media traffic. You can create a Facebook page to your blog and post links there. If you are like me and have a few hundred friends invite them to like you page. The trick to generating traffic from this however is not the likes on your page but sharing it on your personal page. Facebook is much closer knit than Twitter. People are more social and open to talking to you about your projects. They are more likely to follow your links. On Pinterest you can generate traffic by adding really great photos to your website, and also your Pinterest boards. People are likely to click on a beautiful picture that includes a link than a cut and dry link with no photo or a photo of lesser quality.
Social media is a fantastic way to get your brand out there while also generating traffic. Many people do not use social media in a way that generates a lot of traffic. The advice I can give them blogger owner to owner is be social! Posting link after link and promotion after promotion isn't going to make people want to connect with you and your website. Get social with your followers and social media friends. Remember little things about them. You can do this by creating a little note document and write a sentence about them. For example if a friend or follower is opening a pet store write a note about it. Then the next time they are online ask them about it. If you are a tangible human and not just a link stuffing robot people will respond to you better.
I don't recommend using Twitter for traffic generation; I do however recommend Twitter for branding and contests. A contest I held once on Twitter was to generate more newsletter subscribers. I posted once a day using a tweet scheduler that one out of the people who subscribed to my blog within that week would receive a $10 amazon gift card code. My subscriber list doubled. Twitter has many uses but traffic does not seem like one of them.
