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Use Popular Social Media Platforms to Increase Website Traffic In 2020
It is more important than ever to own your content and avoid reliance on “Big Tech” to house your content or drive your traffic. Using popular social platforms to increase web traffic is different than turning over your audience to them.
Social media has been a powerful tool for publishers to promote content and boost traffic since its arrival in the early 2000s, and at the time, using it for a website or business was the wild west. There are more regulations and restrictions than ever on how to post, how often, and many site’s traffic from larger social media platforms like Facebook has drastically declined, or their page has completely disappeared.
Below are some emerging hacks and tips for getting traffic from popular social platforms
We recently released two videos with tips on how to use two social media platforms to drive traffic to your website, but I’ll go over them below. One platform you’ve certainly heard of before but the other one you may be new to.
What is Quora and How Can I Use It to Drive Website Traffic?
There is a long list of social media platforms of which you’ve probably heard or used–Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, A lesser-known but very useful gem in the abundance of available social platforms is Quora.
Quora is a large online community designed, in the simplest terms, for asking questions and providing answers. If used well, it often drives more referral traffic to digital publishing websites than Twitter.
While asking questions and receiving answers is certainly the core of the platform, it is also a great way to put yourself out there as an expert in as many topics as possible.
To begin using Quora, you will have to create a profile.
A Quora profile allows you to provide viewers with a small bio (green); follow specific threads and users and answers you’ve provided (blue); and add credentials (purple) and topics you’re an expert in (orange).
There are two ways to go about answering questions within Quora–searching for topics you’re familiar with and answering questions asked directly by others to you, which is one reason why it is important to add topics you know about in your profile.
For example, if we look up something like ‘kombucha,’ we can follow it as a topic and scroll through questions the Quora community has asked about it.
Whereas if I had added ‘kombucha’ in my list of known topics and credentials, someone could see my profile as a viable resource for it and ask me a question about kombucha. Since I have ‘web development,’ ‘web design,’ and ‘digital publishing’ as topics I know about, I have been directly asked the questions below. I can choose to either answer them or pass.
Like many social media platforms, Quora has a few policies that keep people from just spamming Quora with links to a website. If you do this, the answer would likely get taken down and your profile banned. Additionally, it’s a poor way to get people to your content because there are very few people who would just click on a website link within the answer of a Quora question.
If you can find or are asked a question that some of your content relates to, you can quickly become the best answer to that question. To fall within policy and rank well for an answer, take a little time to provide a thorough and resourceful answer. This can often provide thousands of extra visitors to a website and make your answers stand out.
To start, you will want to include a short-but-sweet line as the first sentence of your answer and bold it. You can also include multiple headlines throughout to go more in-depth and keep things organized.
Under the header, you can go into a more in-depth answer, provide relevant images or links to your website, and/or bulleted lists. All of these elements will make your answer stand out as thorough, knowledgeable, and trustworthy.
As more people read your answer and find it valuable, they can ‘Upvote’ your answer, much like liking a video on YouTube or a post on Facebook.
What’s great about Quora is you can directly copy and paste parts of your articles as an answer and it won’t count as duplicate content; it will not be indexed, so Google will just consider it scraped content and your site will still get the credit.
When you finish your answer, be sure to include something like ‘You can find more details in this article…” and hyperlink to the article you pulled from. Additionally, if you have multiple articles on this topic that you touch on in your answer, you can hyperlink throughout your answer to those articles as well.
Quora is a bit of a numbers game, so another way you can separate yourself as more credible is to add your credentials at the bottom of your answers so that others are more likely to trust you. Quora allows you to create multiple credentials.
If you want to see how successful you are performing on Quora beyond increases in traffic to your site, you can look at your stats and see how many views your content has and how many views in the current month (blue).
On the lefthand side, you can also see how many answers you’ve provided, click on individual questions you’ve answered, and see how many views your answer has acquired (purple).
How to Use Twitter for Increasing Website Traffic
Another social media platform you’ve surely heard of and may even use as a supplement to your website is Twitter. Driving traffic with Twitter can be difficult, but some publishers and influencers have had a lot of success with it.
How to get fast traffic from Twitter
One of the ways you can use Twitter to increase traffic is to be the first to comment on popular tweets.
If we look at a site that we often use as an example in our blogs, Injury Health Blog, we can see it has had success using this approach. By looking at its Google Analytics, we can see that there is a spike between March and April 2019. During this time, a particular athlete in the NFL had a small injury to their MCL. Injury Health Blog already had an article covering MCL injuries and was the first to comment on a few NFL commentators’ Twitters with the link to its MCL article. Subsequently, the article and thus website had a surge of traffic.
To begin doing this to acquire more traffic to your website, head to the Explore tab on Twitter. From here, you can click through suggested tweets for you, breaking news, and more. You can also search Twitter directly to see if there are new tweets pertaining to a topic on which you have content.
If this is done correctly, it can really drive your traffic to your website all at once.
You can also look within your feed to see if any prominent Twitter accounts have posted recently. On my feed, I’ve found a tweet that was just posted from AFP News Agency, which has over 17 million followers.
If I had a website pertaining to Chinese or British politics, ancient Greek art and sculptures, or historic disputes between countries, I could quickly retweet with a comment with relevant information or opinions from my website, and then add a link to the particular article I am referencing.
These are just a few ways to use two social media platforms; there are certainly more tactics to try and platforms to utilize. We recently published a blog on five social media strategies for 2020 that has some valuable insights into other social media platforms.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer back.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]
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