Attracting targeted traffic to your website doesn’t begin or end with Google. While there’s nothing wrong with either organic or pay-per-click traffic, you need to diversify your sources so that a disruption and loss of traffic from any one channel will not devastate your company. In other words, don’t put all of your eggs into one basket.

One excellent way to diversify your traffic is through social media marketing. In addition to being effective platforms for engaging with fans and friends of your company’s brands, the major social media networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn, if properly leveraged, can directly boost traffic to your website.

What’s more, social media marketing sends important signals about your site’s relevancy and authority to Google and the other search engines that can help improve your organic search rankings.

How to Effectively Leverage Social Media

• The key to social media success is to talk with your audience, not at them. Forget the canned one-way sales pitches, and think engagement. Take the passion that you have for your product, add it to the interest that your audience has already expressed in your product category or niche, and start seeking a common ground for genuine two-way engagement.
• Listen to the questions and issues that are being raised about your brand or niche. Take the time to learn more about your audience’s needs, concerns, and fears. Then talk to them as would talk to a friend who needs your help and advice. Become that friend in the industry and you’ll be rewarded with likes, follows, content shares, and yes – traffic to your website.
• Create quality content that provides genuine value to your audience. Make generous use of relevant photos and other graphic images. Encourage sharing and be sure to include links back to your company website; linking to a relevant and well-optimized landing page will improve your conversion rate.
• Track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. Various analytical tools are available that can help you determine which campaigns to maintain and which should be eliminated.
• Strive for consistency through regular scheduled posting. Effective social media marketing requires a consistent and ongoing effort. You should be posting to your social media channels on a daily basis, weekly as a bare minimum.

9 Tips for Driving Website Traffic with Social Media

• Host your blog on your company website and not on a third-party blog platform.
• Invite your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.
• Monitor social media conversations for mention of your product category or niche; respond with a pertinent comment and include a link to your site.
• Use the same target keywords from your SEO campaign on your social media posts.
• Embed relevant YouTube videos on your website.
• Share your videos across your social media channels.
• Link your business website to all of your social media channels.
• Create a separate Twitter account for your business, and use it to follow relevant people in your niche.
• Tweet your content a minimum of 4 times; Twitter is updated so frequently that single posts may get missed.