B2B Social Media: How to Drive Website Traffic

Is Social Media Driving Traffic to your Site?

Social media is a great way to connect and engage with your target audience, humanize your organization, and have some fun in general.  What you may not be willing to post to your corporate homepage can be appropriate for your Facebook page.  It may not make sense to post articles from your industry or competitors to your site, but tweeting them with some commentary makes perfect sense.  And so on.

But there is more value to social media for a B2B company than simply that.  The big 3 sites — Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — can be great traffic drivers to your B2B website and in turn great lead generators.  (Overtime Google+ may join this trio but I am not completely sold yet).  In this post I am going to share some tactics OpenView has implemented in order to increase our traffic from social media by about 400% over the past year.  By putting in the work and executing against these simple tips, your company can see great results as well!

How to Increase your Traffic with Social Media in 5 Quick Steps

1. Getting set up – First step is to set up a presence on each account if you have not already done so.  I think it makes sense to set up the accounts with your brand name, however some have argued setting up the names with a descriptive phrase that defines your space (i.e. OnStartups, etc).  If something that is relevant to your industry is available, you may want to snap it up!  Here are some guides to help you set up your profiles:
   • Mashable’s Guide to Facebook
   • Using LinkedIn
   • Twitter for beginners
2. Engaging – Once you have the accounts set up, define a process for posting and engaging and stick to it.  For Twitter, stick to the 4-1-1 rule from Tippingpoint Labs.  That is for every one promotional tweet, you should send one retweet and four tweets promoting content outside of your domain name.  For Facebook, try to post something every day whether it is a picture or written piece of content.  For LinkedIn, try to post once a day as well focusing on blog posts, articles, and news items.  To ensure you are hitting the engagement mark, ask questions and ask for comments.
3. Becoming more social – Ensure that your site is set up in a way that promotes social sharing.  Include the major “buttons” — Inshare for LinkedIn, Tweet for Twitter, Like for Facebook — so that it is really easy for everyone to share your content.  Ensure that these buttons automatically populate the message with some text such as the title and a shortened link.
4. Getting the team on board – In order to really get the engine going you’ll need some help.  I think it makes sense to target the senior team and marketing team first.  First you need to ensure everyone has the necessary accounts on social media.  You may consider giving training sessions or lunch and learns to share the basics of each network.  Make it easy for everyone to participate by automating the process (more on that later) and sending emails or reminders to share content.
5. Identifying ways to streamline the process – I know there are several schools on thought on this topic.  Some say never outsource social media and others champion the idea of hiring interns to manage social media accounts.  Instead of focusing on who does what (that is a topic for another blog post!) focus on ways to minimize human interaction.  Now wait, I thought social media was about being human.  It is!  But there are ways to make the whole process easier.  Think about using CoTweet to manage multiple Twitter accounts or HootSuite to schedule out content.  Dlvr.it is another great way to sync up RSS feeds to various destinations/accounts so that they automatically tweet once new content is posted.  Just remember to mix in some other tweets/shares so you don’t sound like a robot!

How are you using social media to drive website traffic?