We can’t deny the fact that social media is part of our day-to-day life. All of us are connected with social media as consumers, marketers, or social beings. What started as entertainment now evolved to be one of the most powerful marketing channels for businesses. Therefore, it would be a real waste if you aren’t taking advantage of social media to grow your business.

Social media is a great way to digitally connect and interact with your target audience 24/7, which gives you the opportunity to create a loyal audience base for your brand. So, here are the ten best practices to use social media to grow your business.

Let’s get started!

1. Get to Know Your Target Market

Knowing about your target market/audience is essential to growing your business through the power of social media. The clearer you are about your target audience, the better you understand what will appeal to your potential customers. And the less you know about your target audience, the less likely you’ll succeed through your social media marketing efforts. Find about your target audience by creating an imaginary customer profile or by watching out who your competitors are targeting.

2. Develop Your Social Media Strategy

It takes time and effort to build a popular social media profile. But, at the same time, it’ll take proper strategy and planning. Always, you need to create a rock-solid plan to accomplish your goals, the same theory will apply to your social media. So, create your social media strategy on how are you going to create your posts? How often will you post it? Will you use social media influencers? Power of your user base? Make use of social media ads? And so on. Once you’ve determined these facts you can easily craft your social media strategy that’ll help you to leverage the power of social media to grow your business.

3. Focus On Your Posts Quality, Not Quantity

Definitely, your goal isn’t about attacking your social media users with countless posts. It’s not quantity but the quality of your posts that benefit your social media users. So, make sure each of your social media posts conveys an important message or provides some unique information that is relevant to your target audience. This you can increase your social media engagement and build a loyal follower base for your social media channels.

4. Add Real Value On Social Media

Always strive to provide real value through your social media posts. What do your social media posts achieve? Is it motivational or educational? Does it answer a question your target audience might be wondering? Does it help to motivate people out there to acquire a certain lifestyle? Create useful social media content for your target audience, be it insightful infographics, blog posts, or tutorial videos. Adding value will make your social media content and brand stand out, and your audience will consider you as a reliable and thoughtful brand.

5. Follow High-Profile Social Media Accounts

When you started to follow other high-profile social media accounts that will create the first bits of visibility for your brand. You can also measure what was working for those high-profile social media accounts that were already at the top of their game. Altogether, following high-profile social media accounts will help you to gain your visibility and allows you to identify solid ways to thrive your social media performance.

6. Regularly Comment, Share, And Like 

According to its name, social media is a very social platform. That’s why it’s important to get out there and find interesting pieces of content to comment on, leave likes, share that information, and reply to others’ comments. This practice gives increased visibility to your brand as well as makes your business more personal and approachable among your audience. In nutshell, if you’re really serious about leveraging social media to grow your business, regularly commenting, sharing, and liking is the best way to build a relationship with your social media audience and in return, you’ll receive their loyalty which enhances your business growth.

7. Leverage The Power Of Social Media Influencers

When you’re a newbie on social media, it’s a bit hard to reach your target audience, this where you need the help of social media influencers. As social media influencers can leverage the power of their large and highly engaged audience to promote your brand, products, or services on social media. Many businesses and newcomers use this approach to expand their reach at the earlier stage. But, just make sure that you work with social media influencers who have an audience base that is aligned with your own brand’s target audience.

8. Focus More On Social Media Networking

In-person networking is quickly being overpowered by social media networking. Now, social media networking can help you reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers online. Also, social media networking can help you reach new markets to expand your business and enhance your customer service. So, network as much as possible to grow your business and brand visibility. You can join fan pages and social media groups to expand your network and target market, also by participating in the group discussions and value to those discussions you can gain visibility for your brand.

9. Don’t Be Too Promoting & Hard Sell

You need to understand that it’s not always about promoting. If you really want to use social media to grow your business, you have to spend some quality time deliver valuable insights, information, and resources to your customers that benefit them. It can be motivational, inspirational, or entertainment. Simply, you should always aim to add value to your social media posts. This is why it’s best to avoid pushing too hard with your selling and sales promotion because it’s will ultimately push your potential customers away from your business.

10. Make Your Buying Journey Easy For People

With smartphone usage sky-rocketing in recent years, most people accessing their social media accounts on their mobile phones. So, it becomes essential to make your social media channels accessible on mobile devices, also you need to make your business website responsive to mobile devices. Add your website link in your social media profiles, ensuring that your website has a mobile responsive design, and make sure your purchase process is refined for mobile devices so that people can simply and easily buy whatever they need that you’re vending. The easier you make it for them to buy, the more likely you’ll be to close the sale.

Conclusion

Thanks to the digital world we’re currently living in, social media has evolved from just being used as an entertainment channel to a marketing platform where you can build a strong connection with your target audience and effectively sell your products or services. Utilize the above mentioned ten tactics you can take advantage of what social media has to offer. Leveraging the power of social media will pave the path to grow your business successfully in no time!

Have you already started to leverage social media to grow your business? Do you follow any of the above-mentioned tactics? Let me know them in the comments!

Want to use Instagram to market your business? In the following post, I’m going to share the nine strategic ways to drive free traffic to your website with Instagram, stay tuned to discover how to drive Instagram traffic to your website.

Instagram is packed with lots of useful tools and features to grow your business and brand!

Even if you don’t have 100K followers, there are still lots of tactics to use your Instagram that can be your fast-pass ticket to more clicks and conversions.

Let’s get started with the nine easy-to-implement strategies!

How to Drive Instagram Traffic to Your Website?

 

1. Leverage Your Instagram Bio Link

Instagram allows you to include one clickable link in your Instagram bio, So, when you set up your Instagram profile, you most likely added your website (homepage) link in the bio, right? However, you can do so much more with this little bio link.

You can frequently update your Instagram bio link to point to any webpage of your website. It can be:

• A newly launched product page
• A featured story
• A new campaign page
• A lead converting webpage

You can draw attention to the bio link by adding strategic call-to-actions in your Instagram post captions that explain the of the  link, your CTA can be:

• Read the complete story at the link in our bio
• For more insights, navigate through the link in our bio
• Click on the link in our bio to learn more information about

To get better results for your “Link in bio” strategy, you need to be consistent and by adding call-to-action in your bio you can speed up your process. Link in bio is a significant way to drive more Instagram traffic to your website.

2. Use Instagram Shops to Tag Products

With the Instagram Shops feature, you can turn your Instagram into an Online storefront by tagging your products and creating shoppable posts on Instagram.

While tagging your products you can consider the following elements:

• You can use nearly 5 tags in your Instagram posts or videos
• Make carousel posts with up to 20 images that can be a lookbook album for your brand.
• You can able to use one product sticker in your Instagram stories

In your Instagram profile, you can see a shopping tab where you can check out your tagged product range.

These product tagging features attract your audience’s attention and let them to click-through to the product on your website. Also, this one of the best organic ways to promote shopping on Instagram and drive Instagram traffic to your website.

While using the Instagram Shops Feature, make sure to:

Follow Instagram’s eligibility criteria.

Connect with Facebook catalog

Sign up in the Instagram mobile app with your business profile.

3. Add Links to Your IGTV Posts

Did you know that you can add clickable links to your IGTV post descriptions?

This simple hack is one of the great ways to drive your IGTV viewers to your business website, or other relevant links. The best approach to get more views on your IGTV posts and clicks on those links in your IGTV posts your description is to add a call-to-action and a swipe up the link from your Instagram Stories. You can also add a call-to-action on your IGTV title to attract clicks for your links in the description.

Once you’ve created your IGTV video post, you can add a link to your IGTV channel and videos to your Instagram Stories to get your viewers’ attention. We all know videos are effective ways to engage with your audience, so, driving your viewers to your IGTV channel is a great tactic to get Instagram traffic to your website.

4. Include Links to Instagram Stories

If you have 10K followers or a verified account. You can add direct links to your Instagram Stories! Trust me this feature is an instant game-changer and there are several ways to make it valuable for your brand.

First of all, it’s always worth to provide a quick explanation for why someone should “swipe up” and click on the link, you can do it verbally or through a text caption on your Instagram Stories. It’s a good way to drive more clicks. Also, you can add eye-catching GIF images that encourage more “swipe up” from your Instagram Stories Viewers. Besides, by using “swipe up” call-to-action stickers you can make it more attractive for your viewers which helps you to boost the number of clicks from them and increase the Instagram traffic to your website.

5. Curate Traffic Via Instagram Stories Highlights

You can use Instagram Stories Highlights to consistently drive traffic from your linked Instagram Stories past 24 hours. This Instagram feature lets you group your Instagram Stories and forever feature them on your Instagram profile.

 

But, don’t add every story in a highlight, tactically curate a library of evergreen Instagram Stories that you want to put in the limelight in front of your Instagram audience or you can keep it simple by using a single story per highlight as navigation to the key pages of your website.

6. Leverage Instagram Direct Messages

Encourage your Instagram followers to start up a conversion with you through Instagram direct messages (DMs). Not only your followers, but you can also start the conversation by welcoming new followers and asking relevant questions. For this purpose, you can create a formatted text and insert it into a direct message of every new joiner, this way you can avoid typing the same thing over and over to different people. Besides, make sure to monitor your inbox daily.

With Direct messages, you’ll get a deeper understanding of your audience, and you will be able to link them to relevant pages of your website.

7. Allow Push Notifications on Instagram

The best way to increase the reach of all these above link methods is to encourage your followers to turn on Instagram push notifications for your Instagram posts, IGTV posts, and Instagram Stories. For this, your Instagram audience must click on the “following button”, then need to enable the push notifications, and opt-in. After, completing these processes they will receive notifications on their phone every time you post new content on your Instagram profile. That’s why getting a small section of opt-in from your audience will certainly spike your Instagram KPIs.

So how do you get that opt-in from your Insta audience?

You could run a campaign on Instagram or you can simply ask your audience to do so. Trust me, you’d be surprised how many people respond to your direct request, and respect your audience for that.

8. Get Connected with Instagram Influencers

In case, if you don’t have a large Instagram presence, have very few views on your Instagram posts, and can’t able to Link on Instagram Stories, you can partner with an Instagram Influencer who has the reach on Instagram. The influencer can be your brand ambassador and bring in more reach and traffic. This approach will amplify your brand awareness on Instagram.

While choosing your Instagram Influencer, consider how their Instagram audience aligns with yours and how they’ll receive the endorsement of your brand. When you’re working out your partnership agreement with your influencer, ensure you include the guidelines to the influencer to use actionable call-to-action to send their followers to your website.

9. Add Instagram Profile Action Buttons

It’s worth to determine why you want to drive traffic. Is it for people to contact you? Book an appointment?  Or buy your products?

All these above-mentioned actions and more can be taken directly on your Instagram profile with profile action buttons. With this feature, you could directly drive more traffic and conversions without any mediators. By using the right Profile Action Buttons and strategy, you can grow your brand through Instagram.

Conclusion

Now, Instagram becomes a revenue-based social media channel. So, you can use your Instagram followers’ data to build your content strategies, drive revenue, and brand awareness from sharing clickable links. In nutshell, just ensure your Instagram strategy is driving leads to your website.

I hope you found these strategies are helpful for bringing Instagram traffic to your website. Have you tried any of the above strategies? Let me know how it impacted your website traffic in the comments below.