Driving Traffic To Your Site: How Useful is Facebook?

Can Facebook drive traffic to your site?

With over 1.1 billion active monthly users, it’s not a far-fetched reality to assume you could probably use Facebook as a tool to drive some traffic to your content. In fact, if you really harness Facebook properly, it can be a phenomenal way to increase unique page views and keep your products and services in front of current and prospective customers’ eyes.

So, what can this Marketing Hulk do for you?

It’s important to understand what Facebook really offers in terms of driving traffic versus what it cannot offer. Facebook can be incredibly useful if you properly evaluate your product or service and harness the inherent services within Facebook in the best and most unique possible ways. Here are some things you should know before you take the plunge of using Facebook to drive traffic to your site:

1. Complete your businesses profile thoroughly. Unless you’re going after a tongue-in-cheek marketing strategy, or some other type of viral edge, this will be fairly basic. The core of this idea is that, once potential and current customers get to your Facebook page, they’ll have all the information they’ll need about your business at-a-glance.
2. Ensure there’s an easy way to get to your website with a link, and then ensure that posts always have another link to either the portal of your site, or a specific page within your site.

Make use of what’s there!

Come on, you know that opportunities cannot be left strewn around. Facebook is already set up to host things like photos and videos. You’ll definitely want to make use of these multimedia capabilities. Your profile picture, which is smaller and square, should be the most prominent photo associated with your business, which will often be your logo. Then there’s the cover photo, which is larger and rectangular. Decide where the two best visual components or your business will work, and then edit your already existing art to work best on the page. Do not just upload files you already have and hope for the best–this will look sloppy.

Focus is the key

Once everything is set up and looking sharp, it’s time to focus on just two things: content and users.

1. User base – It’s great that you have a Facebook page by now, but it means squat if you don’t have people following you or liking you. You will need to work hard to generate an audience of people that know your product or service or want to get to know your product or service. Here is a secret about how to increase user base through Facebook that nobody would tell you. While you promote your content through Facebook, ‘share’ the post with different people, which will increase your ‘reach’ extensively.
2. Content – Great content that people could associate with can work wonders. Share pictures and quotes that people can relate to – and they will visit your site. Honestly, this will probably involve a part time social media manager, because bots and scripts will not handle this task well. If you’re taking social media seriously, you likely already have one of these individuals in your organization.

Content and users work in tandem. The more content you have, the more audience you’re likely to receive, which will motivate you to add more content, and which will, in turn, get more users.

See what we’re saying? Ensure your content is relevant either to your business, a specific product or service, or your audience. Not every post has to be selling something–often times you can just use content to keep your audience engaged. Frankly, anything that helps them to remember that you exist is a good thing.

Spread the word!

Once you have a solid audience built up, and you’re getting your content liked, that means what you have to offer is spreading. Friends of friends are seeing the activity on your page, and your message is spreading… which is the point! This is a good time to start considering promotional offers that exist “just for Facebook users”. Of course, you can duplicate these offers in other ways via other social media, or offline altogether, but it does help to be creative and get your customer base thinking that they’ve found a unique way to communicate with you.

If you do all these things right, your audience will be coming to your Facebook page, and they will be using it to click over to your site. Your website traffic will go up as unique page views increase, and Facebook will be the tool you never knew how you lived without before.

* Where to begin with Facebook? Simple! First, build your fans on Facebook Fan Page! Learn this 15 Ways to Optimize Social Signals With Facebook Fan pages.