I have a question for you: why did you start a website or a blog? Whether it was for promoting a cause, selling products or services, or having your say in the online world, you need something to achieve that goal: traffic. Tons of it!

There are multiple ways to drive traffic towards your main site: advertising, guest blogging, content marketing, email marketing, and social media networking are only few of them.

Today, we’re going to focus on the link that can connect all marketing techniques that drive traffic to your site: Facebook. Facebook was the first social media platform to surpass 1 billion user profiles. That’s pretty impressive. Facebook provides great opportunities for marketers to attract their target audience through the platform. In the continuation, I’ll show you how to do that.

Why does Facebook matter?

Frankly, the huge number of people who use Facebook on a daily basis should be enough for marketers to include this tool into their campaigns. However, there are few other reasons that make it important:

  • Facebook is the right place for sharing links blog posts, news stories, articles, white papers, and other pieces of content. That’s a great way to boost your content marketing campaign. The Oatmeal page regularly shares content with the Facebook audience, and that’s one of the many reasons why this website is crazy popular.

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  • You can use the platform to schedule events related to the project you promote. If, for example, you have a website that features book reviews, you can arrange meetings with the members through Facebook.
  • Every website that matters has its Facebook presence. Your audience expects to see you out there.
  • Facebook users have friends. If they connect with you, friends with similar interests will follow the lead. Friends of friends will also learn about your site, so the network will grow with great progression.
  • Facebook ads reach a targeted audience. There’s not much waste of resources there.
  • The platform gives you a chance to connect. People will comment on your posts, and you’ll respond. That’s the kind of connection that’s hard to develop solely through your website.
  • Whatever industry your site belongs to, you’ll definitely find the target audience on Facebook.

How to drive traffic through Facebook

Now you know; Facebook is possibly the most important tool for driving traffic to your site. The only question is: how exactly do you use it?

There is a right and wrong way to use the platform for marketing purposes. The wrong way is passivity: you create a profile, post an update or two and wait for amazing things to happen for your site. That won’t work. Let’s talk about the right way: it needs tons of commitment and regular activity. Here are few tips that will support the process:

Find your audience. Target it!

The point of Facebook marketing is attracting your target audience. For that purpose, you’ll need to strategize. First of all, you need to identify the type of person who would be interested to visit your website. What other interests do they have? What Facebook pages would they normally follow? What topics would keep them engaged?

Find that audience and analyze it, so you’ll have the answers to those questions. Once you realize how your typical website visitor behaves on Facebook, you’ll be able to develop customized content and messaging to attract them.

Share images, and make them impressive!

If you observe some of the successful websites that attract visitors through Facebook, you’ll notice that their profiles are dominated by visual content. You’ll see a plain textual update or two, but they will be exceptions from the rule. In most cases, the marketing campaign is focused on grabbing the users’ attention through visuals.

It’s easy to understand and prove that rule through an experiment. Open your Facebook profile and scroll through the feed. You can do this through your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. Scroll without looking for anything specific; you’re like a casual user. The updates that grab your attention – what do they look like? Are you attracted by images, which are pretty big and stunning? If your answer is yes, then you behaved just like an average Facebook user would.

Here is a good example of a full-sized image post by Busted Button. You’ll notice there’s text on the visual, which most Facebook users wouldn’t even notice if it got lost as plain text in the sea of images in their feeds.

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This is your lesson: create cute, relatable images that will attract your target audience.

Publish content as frequently as possible

We’re not talking about crazy frequency that would turn to spamming. We’re talking about regular, daily posts that would keep your audience engaged. Whenever you update your website or blog with fresh content, share the link with your Facebook audience. If you haven’t had the need to update the site lately, the least you could do is share links to useful posts your audience will appreciate.

The point of frequent posting is building awareness. Your followers should know you’re there for them, so they will ask questions i they have any. Frequency is even more important for attracting more people to follow you. If they see a passive page, they won’t be motivated to click the like button, since they won’t expect cool content.

Existential Comics is a cool page that keeps the audience engaged on a daily basis.

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Whenever you use Facebook to share content from your site, make sure to include a link, so that people will follow it. We’re talking about boosting the traffic, after all. You can use Bitly to make it short and sweet.

Facebook ads – a world of opportunities to explore

The Facebook ad will appear as a big, clickable image in the feed of a target user, which will carry the message you want to share. If, for example, I’ve been looking through content and websites for social media advertising, Facebook is going to launch such ads in my feed. It’s a great convenience both for the user and the website that’s being promoted.

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When you’re creating an ad, Facebook gives you a chance to pick an advertising objective. At this point, it would be smart for you to choose “Clicks to Website.” When you create an ad with this objective, Facebook will show them to the target users when they are engaged, so your message will reach them at the right time.

Presenting an ad in the news feed gives you a great advantage: a large image. Thus, you need to pick a great one. It can be a graphic that features a textual call to action, or a beautiful photograph related to your niche. The image needs to attract people to click your ad, so they will be taken to the website.

Make the updates short and sweet

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to attract Facebook users towards an elaborate blog article or a product page; they won’t like seeing a huge chunk of text in your update. If you had an idea to copy and paste an entire excerpt from your posts, now is the right time to tell you: it’s not a good strategy.

Lot’s of Facebook users are using their smartphones to access the platform, so they won’t like scrolling down just to see your post taking too much space. Yoga Journal has a pretty popular Facebook page. The target audience wants to read the content, but the managers of the profile are pretty smart: they understand that the Facebook audience prefers teasers instead of full text. The short messages attract them to click the link to the full publication. That’s what we call a smart way to generate traffic.

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Bottom Line: Every Website Needs an Active Facebook Page

Facebook can really help you get all the traffic in the world, only if you use it the right way. You need a focused, well-developed campaign that might require some investments in ads.

When you pull it off, the results will be amazing!

About the Author: Jessica Freeman is a professional journalist and a freelance content writer at the company Australian WritingsShe focuses her content writing on education, blogging, and marketing developments. You can follow her on Facebook and Google+.