Traffic Generation Ideas for B2B Websites - Part 5

Alastair Kane Search Marketing

Marketing Consultant, Internet Marketing Consultant

Happy Friday all!

If you’ve been following my posts this week, I have been talking about a different B2B traffic generation idea each day.

Here is a summary of the ideas I’ve discussed this week:

Monday - Google Search Ads
Tuesday - Developing a Website Tool
Wednesday - Blogging
Thursday - Being Active on Industry Specific Forums

Today we’ll look at how social media can be a source of website traffic generation.

Idea 5 Social Media

Being active on social media is generally associated with increasing brand awareness.

However, it is also a great traffic generation strategy.

In fact, in a recent Social Media Examiner survey of marketers, website traffic was cited as being the second biggest benefit of businesses using social media.

If you’re a business starting out for the first time on social media, my advice would be to focus on a couple of channels to begin with.

Pick a couple that you know your customers will be active on.

For B2B businesses the obvious choice is Linkedin.

One thing to note about Linkedin, it is a very competitive space at the moment and your message is likely to get drowned out initially.

It can be quite demoralising to post regularly to find you only receive a couple of likes, albeit from people you already know!

The thing with Linkedin, is it’s all about training their algorithm to understand you're a member whose message deserves to get visibility on their platform.

You see their algorithm favours members that have more connections, post regularly and receive lots of engagement.

So what should you do to ‘train’ Linkedin’s algorithm to favour you?

Here are some tips:

Post Regularly - 4-5 times a week is a good frequency to start building your reach
Piggy Back off Popular Members - by commenting on others’ posts, you will gain exposure to their audience
Build Up Your Connections - connecting with other members in your industry will expand the reach of your posts

Linkedin aside, there are other social platforms that your audience will be active on eg Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc

Here are some recommendations to maximise the traffic generation potential from social media:

Optimise Social Profiles. Describe what your business does and link out to the website. This will be a source of website traffic from people wishing to find out more about your business.
Engage With Your Followers. Social media is designed to be…well social. Interact with your followers and ensure you don’t only talk at them. It is important to follow the 80/20 rule when using social media - 80% of your posts should be useful to your audience with only 20% being promotional.
Make Sharing of Website Content Easy. Make sure social share buttons are prominent on your website so readers can easily share your content on their profiles. This will expand the reach of your content to a new audience, thus driving new sources of traffic.
Visual Content Works Best. Who doesn’t like a cat video or a meme? I’m not suggesting businesses share these, but visual posts drive more engagement. So consider what interesting images and videos you could share.

We’ve now come to the end of this series of posts on B2B website traffic generation ideas.

I hope you’ve got something from my articles this week.

If you’d like to find out more on how I can help get your business more traffic from Google through either SEO or PPC, please get in touch.

Wishing you all a great weekend!