How to Convert Blog Visitors to Social Media Followers

 

Post by Adi Englander

It’s obvious that when you have more social media followers it will automatically result in more blog traffic as more people will reshare your posts and click on the links you share.
But Hubspot wanted to confirm this so they conducted a study and found that as sites gain more Twitter followers and Facebook fans, they also gain more traffic as their Alexa Rank goes up.

Do you want to drive more blog traffic with social media? Would you like to convert blog visitors to social media followers?

Having more social media followers will also make your blog appear more credible and improve SEO as the number of social media shares contribute to Google’s ranking algorithm. And these followers can be used in your overall social media marketing, not just for driving more blog traffic.

Let’s look at ways to convert blog visitors into social media followers…

Set your blog’s tweet button to mention your handle

You can easily get followers every time someone tweets from your website by ensuring that your handle gets mentioned.

For example let’s try tweeting from Canva’s blog. When I tweet this post the above tweet appears and as you can see it contains the post title, a link to the post and Canva’s Twitter handle.

When your handle is mentioned in a tweet people will click on it and checkout your profile. If it is well set up they will follow you. If people are already tweeting from your website regularly you should be able to gain a lot of followers quickly. Being mentioned several times by influencers on Twitter will also improve credibility.

You should be able to set your tweet button to mention your Twitter handle in seconds if you are using a tool like Shareaholic or something similar. Doing it manually will require some time.

Add follow buttons

The easiest way to convert blog visitors to social media followers is by adding follow buttons to prominent places on your blog like the header, footer and sidebar. People can click on these follow buttons checkout your pages and follow you.

A site that makes use of follow buttons extremely well is The Oatmeal. On the header and the footer there are follow buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and on the right sidebar there is an Instagram follow widget.

This way you too should add follow buttons of the few networks that bring you the best results.

You can also try adding a follow popup. This when a popup appears on your blog asking people to follow you on your social networks instead of the usual ones that ask you to subscribe by email.

You can see this in action on the Quicksprout website. Just visit any blog post and wait for the popup to appear. It will ask you to like Neil Patel’s Facebook page. Neil’s page has got 637,000 ‘Likes’ (at the time of writing this post). Hence this technique is definitely working. This Facebook Like popup was created using the Hello-bar.

You can also try using a follow slider, where a slider appears from the bottom of the screen asking people to ‘Like’ your Facebook page or to follow you on your other social media.

A website that has been using sliders for a long time to convert visitors to social media followers is Bleacher Report. If you visit their website and scroll down you will see the slider doing its job. You can add the social slider to any website using Sumome’s Scroll Box and Helllobar. WordPress users can also use tools like Milotree and the Smart Slider.

All these tools let you create sliders for your different social networks and even rotate them so that all your networks gain followers.

Embed social mentions on your testimonials page

You can gain more credibility and followers at the same time by embedding social media posts, of people praising you, on your website. This will not only make you appear more credible, but will also get you followers and customers.

An example of a site making the most of this is Live Chat. On their testimonials page they have embedded tweets from happy customers. You can click on these tweets and check out the tweets on Twitter, checkout out the tweeter and even visit Live Chat’s Twitter account as the handle is mentioned in the tweets.

The main aim of a page like this is to gain customers, but you can use a similar strategy to gain followers as I am certain that this strategy is helping Live Chat get Twitter followers along with customers. Social media credibility can be extremely powerful.

Add a ‘follow me’ call to action to your by line

You can also link to your social networks in the byline that appears under your posts and include a call to action asking people to follow you. This will result in more followers. You can apply this technique for posts on your blog and on your guest posts.

Guest posters make the most of this when they write for Content Marketing Institute. When you visit most blog posts like this one you will find a handle and a link to the author’s Twitter account in the byline.

Social media marketing is going to be huge in 2017. These are a few methods you can use to convert blog visitors to social media followers. Once you have captured these visitors you can get them to visit your blog again by sharing the links to your blog posts. You can also get them to purchase your products when you share them on social media.

How do you convert blog visitors to social media followers? Which technique has worked best for you? Please leave your comments below.

Contributer : Socialmedia.biz http://ift.tt/2j1U0EX