ByAre you taking the right steps to convert your blog traffic into social media followers?
As you might have seen in my latest infographic 80% of average blog visits are new visits.
It shows that people are highly unlikely to visit your blog again.
This makes it extremely important for you to work on repeat visits as this can not only increase traffic, but can help you build a relationship with your readers. If people read your work regularly they will be more likely to buy from you, use your services and help you.
Two of the best ways to increase repeat visits are by building your email list and increasing your social media followers. Blog owners should first look into building an email list as it is nearly 40 times more effective than social media.
The rest can be converted into social media followers.
Having more social media followers can boost your traffic as seen in the above graph which shows that blogs with more social media followers have a better Alexa Rank.
I have already covered how to convert blog visitors into email subscribers in my posts 7 Stats to Help You Rapidly Increase Blog Email Subscribers and How to get More than 200,000 Email Subscribers in Less than 4 Years. So here are 5 tips on how to convert blog traffic into social media followers…
1. Add follow buttons to prominent places on your blog:
The simplest way to convert blog traffic into social media followers and fans is by adding social media follow buttons. You could simply place follow buttons using a WordPress plugin like social media widget or you could get a designer to create custom ones that will suit your blog.
For good results place the buttons on prominent places like header, footer and sidebar. You could also use a heat map to check which parts of your blog your visitors look at more and place your social follow buttons there. Also don’t add buttons to each and every social network. Just add ones to your most important ones and focus on growing their social media following. Adding too many can just confuse your visitors and reduce conversions.
You could also add the Twitter Follow button and Facebook like buttons and like box to make it easy for people to follow or ‘Like’ you right from your blog. This method of cutting short the step of visiting your social media page or account and then following you can get you more fans and followers.
As you can see in the above screenshot, Goal.com has placed social media follow buttons right at the top on their header. This should be one of the first things their visitors see and it can help convert blog visitors into social media followers.
2. Use a Pop-up:
Using a pop-up can be a fantastic way to get many social media fans and followers. By this I don’t mean the pop-ups that appear a few seconds after you visit a blog asking you to like their Facebook page. The first pop-up that appears on your blog a few seconds after someone visits it should be for your newsletter or your email subscriber list as building that should be your top priority. The one for social media followers should appear a little later like it does on sites like Upworthy and Mashable.
On Upworthy the ‘Like Us on Facebook’ button appears once someone scrolls down. You can see it on the bottom right corner. On Mashable an algorithm gets the Like button to appear once the visitor performs certain actions. This targets people who are more likely to convert into fans.
3. Get Twitter tweet buttons to mention:
Don’t just install the Twitter button on your blog and leave it at that. You want to make a change so that your blog’s Twitter handle is mentioned every time someone shares a blog post or page. More mentions of your handle in tweets will get more people to check your Twitter account too. And if your content is of the highest quality, you can be sure to get a lot of followers.
Lots of WordPress plugins for share buttons automatically add the Twitter handle you mention in the settings. Look for a good plugin that allows these settings and install it.
Flare is one of the many plugins that lets you do this. All you need to do is add your handle name in the field provided and it will be published every time someone tweets a page or blog post using the Flare Twitter tweet button.
4. Run contests and offers on your blog:
With the Rafflecopter contest App you can install a widget on your blog so that people can become a fan or follower of your social media accounts in order to take part in the contest.
You can either make it mandatory to follow your accounts or you can give them extra points which can increase their chances of winning the contest. Running an engaging contest with a very good relevant prize can get you lots of followers and fans.
In a similar way you can run an offer where the code or instructions required to make use of the offer are only viewable when the person follows the social media account you want them to. For e.g. you can create a page where you place the code which can be used to get a discount, but the entire page isn’t viewable, instead there is a follow button for a social network and instructions that let the reader know that in order to see the code they need to follow you on the network. So people who want to get a hold of the code will follow you on the social network. This can also be highly effective in getting you more followers and fans.
5. Attract more social media traffic:
People who visit your blog from other social networks are also more likely to follow your page or account on the same social network they visited from. People usually Like a Facebook page or Follow a Twitter account to subscribe to their updates.
Special offers and deals, current customer and interesting or engaging content are the top three reasons why people follow a social media account. When a person visits your blog from a social network it shows that they are active on it and if they like your content they will want to see more of it and they will follow you on the same social network.
Another factor that comes into play is that they are already logged in. They don’t need to log in to their account in order to subscribe to your updates. This makes it easy for them. So work on your blog’s social media presence and get people to visit you from the social network on which you want to build your social media following.
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How do you convert blog traffic into social media fans and followers? Which network do you find it very easy to gain followers to through your blog? What other techniques have worked for you? Please leave your comments below.
