When you’re posting on social media — whether it’s to garner more readers for a fresh blog post you’ve just published, to get people to buy a newly launched product, or get sign-ups for your new email newsletter — your ultimate goal is to get people from the social platform to visit your website.
But getting people to click through to your website can be challenging as your audience is constantly flooded with countless other interesting posts in their social feed.
To help you increase your click-through rate, here are six quick and actionable tips that’ll help you capture your followers’ attention and make them want to check out what you have to offer.
1. Write Compelling Titles
As you can imagine, your post’s title holds a lot of weight on the click-through rate.
Whether you’re posting an Instagram story or tweeting, always follow the three C’s of great social copy: creative, concise, and conversational.
Your post’s headline is your audience’s first taste of the actual content, so don’t turn them away with an uninteresting, long-winded, or overly “clickbaity” captions.
While it’s advisable to keep the title succinct, writing full, conversation-like headlines have been shown to increase click-through rates.
Consider illustrating the benefits of clicking-through, including surprising numbers and stats, or asking a thought-provoking question.
For example, if you’re promoting a blog post titled “How to Improve Social Engagement”, instead of copy-pasting the same headline in your social post, write something like “Wish to build better relationships with your customers? Here are five surefire ways to improve your social engagement!”.
Clearly, the latter one is more clickable because it’s conversational and leads with an intriguing question.
2. Use Exciting Visuals
Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, using images in your social media posts is always a good idea. You may not think of Twitter as a visual social platform, but Twitter’s internal data suggests people are three times more likely to engage with Tweets that use visual content.
Even if you’re not redirecting your audience to mouth-watering steaks or the latest pair of kickers on your Shopify Plus store, having a high-quality image to go along with the textual content is better than just text.
Simply put, if your content isn’t eye-catching, no one will bother to stop scrolling and engage with what you have to say. So, use bright images, or better yet, short videos with captions that people can’t help but pay attention to.
Also, avoid using images that are clearly stock photos. Strive to create and upload high-quality visuals of your own.
3. Customize Your Links
The URL you wish to link to can be long and unwieldy, making it visually unappealing for the audience. To make your links more clickable, consider customizing them to make them shorter and also branded.
Using a custom URL shortener to create short links (an abbreviated version of the page domain) is a great way to keep your branding consistent, increase link trust, and boost click-throughs.
Not to mention a shorter link takes up fewer characters in tweets (where you’re limited to 280 characters), leaving more room for crafting a compelling title.
4. Include a Clear Call to Action (CTA)
What do you want your audience to do when they come across your post? Tell them exactly what action you want them to take.
If you want them to check out your brand new product collection, tell them that with a simple phrase like “check out our new winter collection”, and include a link to your catalog page.
Similarly, if you want your audience to comment on your post with their opinion, just ask them to do so.
Essentially, a clear call to action is a proven way to increase content engagement and click-throughs.
5. Post at the Right Times and Frequency
The time and frequency of your posts on social media have an impact on the number of clicks you generate.
You want to get your message across when most of your audience is active, instead of when nobody’s around to hear you.
Find out the best times to post on each social media platform by looking at what times and days you currently get the most engagement.
For Twitter, head over to ‘Twitter Analytics’ and sort by ‘Top Tweets’, you can then look at your top tweets. Analyze which time and day get the most engagement.
Similarly, for Facebook, go to ‘Insights’ and look at what days you get the most reach and likes.
You can even run some tests to see when your audience is most likely to click through your posts. Once you find a definitive pattern, schedule your posts accordingly on each platform.
Plus, by sharing your links more than once across different social platforms, you allow each post to get the maximum possible engagement from your followers.
Don’t hesitate to post the same link twice or thrice, spacing the posts apart a week or two. That being said, don’t oversaturate your audience by posting too often, or you may annoy your followers.
6. Deliver on Your Promise
You’ve created a social media post with a persuasive headline, a powerful call to action, and a riveting image.
Now you must ensure you don’t let your audience down once they click-through to your landing page. For instance, if the title is that of a blog post that promises “How to prepare the best homemade lasagna within two hours”, your audience must actually be able to do that once they click-through and read your blog post.
Because if you don’t keep your word, you can’t expect your audience to trust your brand again. Thus, see to it that you meet visitor expectations with content that leaves them satisfied while also achieving your marketing goals.
All six tips discussed above have the common theme of adding value to your audience’s social experience.
The more effectively you get it in front of your audience’s eyes, the better the relationships you will build, which, in turn, will lead to more clicks and, thus, more business.
Author Bio:
Gaurav Belani is a senior SEO and Content Marketing analyst at Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. He has more than seven years of experience in digital marketing. He likes sharing his knowledge in a wide range of domains ranging from marketing to human capital management and much more. His work is featured in several authoritative business publications. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter at @belanigaurav.
