21 Actionable Tips to Drive Traffic from Social Media +Poll

Which Social Media Channel is the best for driving organic traffic to your blog or website?

What are the most effective ways to generate enough traffic from Social Networks?

These two questions seem to concern the majority of bloggers & website owners, so I did my best to cover them in this post!

Of course, I wouldn’t be able to accomplish that without the help of all people who voted on my polls & the professional bloggers that provided us with their best tips, based on their experience!

Social Media Poll’s Results

I asked the question “Which Social Media platform drives the majority of your organic traffic to your blog?” on my Social channels.

Here are what bloggers & website owners voted:

Facebook:

Social Media drives more traffic to blogs

Twitter:

Instagram (new account):

This way, the combined results are (including all other bloggers I reached out to contribute) :

Which Social Media drives more traffic to a blog
Pol Sm BAr2 1

Pinterest is the winner, with Facebook and Twitter coming close at 2nd and 3rd place.

But how to use Pinterest successfully? Keep reading to find out the answer!

If you haven’t voted already, please do it in this poll:

Which Social Media platform drives more traffic to your blog?
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Reddit
  • LinkedIn
  • Other: comment below

Vote

Also, I reached out to 19 professional & experienced bloggers. I asked them to provide us actionable tips about how we can drive traffic from Social Media to our blog.

Note that every niche performs better in different Social Network platform, that’s why I included contributors from different niches to tell us about their experience.

More specifically, I asked them the following questions:

1) Who are you, how long are you blogging

2) Describe us the best ways to attract relevant traffic from Social Media/ I look for actionable tips that our readers can use

3) Which Social Media drives the majority of your traffic

The numbers before their answers indicate the corresponding question.

(All Tailwind links in this post are affiliate links which means I’ll earn a small commission if you use them at no extra cost to you. I was recommending it anyway, but I feel so confident about this app that I signed up for their affiliate program. )

Many of them (including myself) recommend using Tailwind for driving traffic to our blogs.

What is it & why everybody is recommending it?

Tailwind is an easy-to-use Pinterest scheduler. It offers 100 free scheduled Pins (no time restriction) and lets you join up to 5 Tribes and submit 30 pins per month for free.

Here’s a link from the official Tailwind blog that indicates the typical results of Tailwind for Pinterest Members.

It’s more than enough to get started! No credit card required.

After you signed up, you can follow a step-by-step tutorial that guides you through all basic & advanced features, so I won’t expand about it here.

But why is it so important?

  • It lets you schedule a week’s or even a month’s Pins in a matter of minutes. You need to be consistent & active daily with your pinning in order to receive significant traffic from Pinterest.
  • It saves you so much time. It is worth it to invest a few bucks in it in order to save many hours of daily & manual pinning. You can use this time to create content and raise your profits.
  • It has a function called “Tribes”. Tribes are groups of content creators in the same niche who Pin each other’s Pins on relevant boards. This way, your pins get a significant boost on Saves and organic impressions.

But I know you love numbers:

Tribes Reach Recieved

Yes, it’s impressive!

9.5 Million organic Pinterest impressions received only from Tribes, not from Pinterest in general.

This is why Pinterest in combination with Tailwind is probably the best way to drive traffic, especially to new blogs.

However, this doesn’t apply to all niches, but it does to the majority of them!

Example of Tailwind Tribes

I strongly recommend you to give Tailwind a try! In the worst-case scenario, you just don’t use it after you consume your free scheduled Pins, while you’ll have already gained some traffic from using it!

If Pinterest isn’t your thing, below you’ll find actionable tips for all popular Social Media platforms!

How to Drive Traffic from Social Media

It’s time to meet our contributors:

Faizan Ali | WPbeginner.com

Faizan Ali

1) My name is Faizan and I work for the largest WordPress resource site in the world, WPBeginner. Besides educating the masses about WordPress we also teach them how to start their own blog and market it.

I have been blogging for over 9+ years. Before I joined WPBeginner I used to write for sites in the VPN niche.

2) Over the years I know for a fact that the best way to drive traffic from social media is through Facebook groups. I have tried this when we worked in the VPN niche which helped me increase my social traffic by 128%. Currently, WPBeginner has also launched a Facebook group which is sending us a lot of traffic.

If you haven’t created a group yet, you can always market your content to other groups that have good engagement. But this approach isn’t scalable as you might get flagged as a spammer if you share too much of your content. The best way is to create a group for your target audience.

3) For me, Facebook groups send the most traffic if you keep it engaged. It doesn’t matter if you are running or a blog or an eCommerce site. Facebook groups work in all cases.


Sofia Naznim | SofiaNaznim.com

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1) My name is Sofia Naznim. I’m a full-time corporate strategist and a part-time writer and blogger. I’ve been blogging since 2015, 4 years of exploring and dedicating myself to what I love and enjoy the most in life – writing

2) For me 5 best ways to attract traffic from social media:

  • Quality photo and content – visual attract, caption captivate your audience
  • Find your niche – what you truly good at. If you’re an all-rounder like me, perhaps Lifestyle is your niche
  • Engage with your followers – human love interaction. Leave them some likes and comments and reply to theirs.
  • Support fellow communities – mutual support from people that have the same interest and vision as you go a long way
  • Have the important social media platforms – know which work best for you. What’s your top 3 platforms, post there frequent, and link them if you can

3) Hottest social media platforms for me:
Organic traffic from Google
Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn


Alek Asaduryan | Yescycling.com

AlekAsaduryan

1) My name is Alek Asaduryan, and I own YesCycling.com, a website dedicated to cycling.

Also Read: How to Create a Lead Magnet with Canva: 7 Ideas to Grow Your Email List

I’m blogging for 3 years, and I monetize my website through affiliate marketing plus a little bit of advertising.

2) I tend to attract traffic via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. I share all my new blog posts on these social networks using some nice apps and services like HootSuite and TailWind.

3) Definitely, social network number one for me is Pinterest. I get almost 95% of my social traffic from the pins I add each day. Tailwind is definitely helping a lot with the scheduling.

One actionable tip I can give to all blog owners today is to be consistent on social networks. Use all of them and post daily until you find which one works for your niche.


Marc Andre| VitalDollar.com

marc andre

1) My name is Marc and I’ve been blogging full-time since 2008. I’ve had blogs in niches like web design, photography, and now I run a personal finance blog, VitalDollar.com

2) I would advise bloggers to choose one social network to dedicate most of their time and effort to. I think a lot of bloggers try to be active on many different platforms, and as a result, they don’t have much success with any of them.

It’s fine to have a presence on several different social networks, but if you’re working with a limited amount of time, it’s best to dedicate the majority of time and effort to one social network that is popular with your target audience.

3) Pinterest has been the best social network in terms of sending traffic to my blog. It sends far more traffic than all other social networks combined.

For bloggers who want to get more traffic from Pinterest, I think one of the best things you can do is create more images and pins for your content. When you have a pin that does well and sends a lot of traffic to your site, create more images and pins for the same content.

Take some time to study the designs that other bloggers are using for their pins and work to improve your own pin design. Better-looking, more attention-grabbing images will have a huge impact on your success with Pinterest.


Evan Porter | TrustySpotter.com

Evan Porter

1) My name is Evan Porter. I’ve been blogging and doing online marketing full-time on my own for a little over a year, but have been blogging and publishing on the web for several years — I’ve been featured on Upworthy, Huffington Post, AskMen, Mindbodygreen, and more.

2) I avoid treadmill social media like the plague. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook demand posts every day, and if you lay off, the traffic stops.

Instead, I pursue evergreen platforms like Pinterest and YouTube that function as search engines. You’ll still get occasional spikes of “viral” traffic, but with the right strategy, you can build those platforms up to provide a steady stream of highly-engaged traffic year-round.

3) Pinterest brings the majority of my social traffic to my blogs. For all the Pinterest tricks and hacks out there, like how many times a day to pin, how many times to repin the same post, etc., the biggest thing to remember is that Pinterest responds well to fresh content.

You’ll only get so much mileage out of your old blog posts before it’s time to start creating new content your audience will love.


Cynthia Ruff |DarlingDownSouth.com

Cynthia Ruff Headshot

1) My name is Cynthia Ruff I am the Founder of Darling Down South and I have been blogging for 6 years now.

2) Create call-to-actions that encourage link clicks. Whether that is optimizing your images on Pinterest with graphics and click-bait titles (10 Reasons You Should Start Decorating with Shiplap) or encouraging your followers on Instagram to go to your blog/website due to unique information that they can’t get on Instagram or a giveaway only available to blog readers (Comment on today’s blog post to win a $25 gift card!). This way people are enticed to click on your content.

3) Hands down Pinterest and it’s not even my highest social media following. It’s a VISUAL search engine and the highest growing social platform by users year over year.

Using Tailwind for Pinterest has also helped me double my traffic within a year and get more clicks because of their Tribes feature and being able to schedule out all of my pins for a month in a couple of hours.

You can read our blog at http://darlingdownsouth.com and find us on social media instagram.com/darlingdownsouth pinterest.com/darlingdownsouth and facebook.com/darlingdownsouth


B.C. Kowalski | FrugalWheels.com

BC Kowalski FrugalWheels

1) Hello, I’m B.C. Kowalski and I’ve run www.frugalwheels.com  since April 2019. Before that, I founded and sold a website called jgeeks.com, focused on Japanese pop culture.

2) Twitter has been the main driver of these connections. One thing that’s worked well for me is mentioning influential bloggers in a post. This is like seasoning; you have to be very careful when you do this. It needs to be relevant. A good example: I wrote a post called “The air conditioning apology I owe Mr. Money Mustache.” I tagged him in the post, and it drove hundreds of hits back to my site and today it remains one of my most popular posts.

On Facebook, groups are a big help. I keep a Facebook page up, but Facebook’s algorithms today don’t allow the reach it once did. But the FB groups are great!

3) The bottom line is that, at least in my opinion, social media is much more effective if you use it to form connections with people in your field/topic, tag relevant people, and in Facebook to use groups to your advantage. And with all of these, use discretion and treat it like salt: a little goes a long way.


What is the best strategy to attract traffic to your blog through Social Media? Click to learn what bloggers recommend as their #1 traffic source! Also, they provided us with their best actinable tips to drive traffic to your blog! See all the poll's results & vote as well!

(Pin this image for reading the post later!)

Sarah Tamsin | SarahTamsin.com

SarahTamsin

1) My name is Sarah and I’ve been blogging for 4 years, blogging is my business and my primary source of income.

2) I use Pinterest to drive traffic to my blog posts. For every blog post, I create multiple images to share on Pinterest. Vertical images with large, striking text and attractive images perform very well on Pinterest as they encourage readers to click-through and read the full article.

Also, since enabling Rich Pins in Pinterest’s account settings, I’ve seen a further increase in traffic from Pinterest. With Rich Pins enabled, every image pinned from your website will automatically use the title and meta-data from each blog post to populate the pin’s description.

This makes it easy to share content to Pinterest directly from your blog and your pins are more likely to appear in search results with rich titles and descriptions.

3) Pinterest is by far the biggest source of social media traffic. Despite Pinterest being categorized as Social Media, it actually behaves far more like a search engine. If you start treating your Pinterest strategy in the same way as your search engine strategy, you’ll soon start to see an influx of traffic from Pinterest!


Louis Watton | Shiply.com

louis watton dp

1) My name is Louis Watton and I am the marketing executive for a company called Shiply

2) We have two tactics that we use to gain traffic from social media for our website and they work best on separate platforms.

One of the most useful aspects of Twitter is how current all discussions are. You can harness recent news and discussions for your business to generate views around your profile and subsequently drive traffic to your site.

By contributing to relevant discussions around your industry and reacting to the news you make sure that not only are you a constant presence in these types of conversations but also that people can come to your profile for a hot take.

3) Through Facebook, you tend to find that content that prompts people to tag their friends is a great way of generating a following and increasing potential website traffic.

Also Read: Ready Set Blog for Traffic Review (Blogging Course)

The single easiest way to create this content is simply a funny or intriguing image with a caption encouraging shares along the lines of ‘tag a friend who would do this’.

It may seem like click-bait (and it is) but it generates a lot of activity around your profile, which gets your site in front of potential visitors, and best of all it only takes 5 minutes!’


Maria | HandfulofThoughts.com

Maria Handful of Thoughts

1) My name is Maria and I am the creator of Handful of Thoughts a new blog that launched this July.  Since inception, my blog traffic has been growing month after month with the majority of the traffic currently coming from social media sources.

2) Here are the best ways I have found to attract traffic to my blog:

Twitter:

  • follow relevant accounts to my niche
  • Like, retweet and respond to tweets that show up in my feed
  • Tweet out new posts
  • Regular interaction is key (not just tweeting new posts)

Instagram:

  • Regular posts (not just new blog posts)
  • follow relevant accounts to my niche
    • 2 key ways I find these accounts – 1) through suggested people to follow (by Instagram) & 2) through who other people I am following are following
  • Regularly like and comment on posts
  • Post new content with “link in bio”
  • Lots of relevant hashtags

Pinterest:

  • Regular pinning (multiple pins daily, own & others)
  • Keyworded boards
  • Minimum of 10 pins per board
  • Keyworded descriptions
  • I use Tailwind to schedule out pins in advance to save time

One of the biggest pieces of advice/actionable items I would tell bloggers is to use social media to interact and build a community.  If you are just using it to post your new posts or content it comes off as shallow and not someone people want to follow.

The second actionable tip that I use to leverage social media is whenever I have a post that links to someone else’s content I will send them an email through their contact page.

I let them know that I have linked to their content, I send the link to my post as well as an ask to share the post through their social media channels.  This is a great way to leverage other people’s social media followers and its a win-win.  The other person gets a backlink and it usually doesn’t take too much effort to share content which brings viewers to my blog.

3) The social media that brings the most traffic to my site at the moment is Twitter, which coincidentally is also the social media that takes the least amount of my time to manage.


Matt Ramey | MoneyByRamey.com

Ramey

1) My name is Matt Ramey and I run MoneyByRamey.com.  I’ve been blogging for 2.5 yrs and write primarily on finance topics, with the emphasis on investing.

2) My advice to newbie bloggers would be to:

  • Get on Pinterest!  It’s been great, even for an investing-specific site like mine.
  • Find groups (especially FB groups) where you can engage with others.
  • Be personable and answer questions.  Be the go-to resource in your specific sector.

3) Facebook: Previously not the greatest engagement site, but that all changed when I began joining specific facebook groups.  Now through engagement in those groups, it is the highest traffic source.

Pinterest:  Surprising source of traffic.  My second-highest source of traffic behind Facebook.  I’m not inclined towards graphic design, but I have a VA who is, so she is all over the creation of neat pins.

Twitter:  My most favorite channel, but really the worst performer.  This site brings in little traffic to my website.

Instagram: Decent source of traffic, though again, very visual in nature.  3rd biggest traffic driver behind FB & Pinterest.


Gladice Gon | EarnMoreLiveFreely.com

gladice gong

1) My name is Gladice Gong. I am a personal finance blogger and have been blogging for 3 years.

2) I highly recommend Quora. The key to attracting relevant traffic is to identify the topics that are related to your niche and then answer questions that are of great interest to many people.

Last but not least, you have to write insightful and helpful answers that get upvotes and shares. When you write your answers, you can link out to the relevant content on your website that you feel will benefit the readers.

3) Quora is my first source if traffic.


Sean Ogle | LocationRebel.com

Sean Ogle Location Rebel Head Shot

1) I’ve been blogging at Location Rebel for 10 years and Breaking Eighty for 7 years now.

2) Across every industry I’ve worked in, I’ve found there one thing always holds true when it comes to traffic from social media: personality wins. You have to have a personality, and be authentic with your audience.

The more of a real person I am, even when I’m acting as a brand, the more I can humanize it the better every metric is. As far as tactics, when you’re authentic, and then give people a specific call to action your response is multiples better than when you don’t.

3) On YouTube, I give them a specific landing page to sign up for on every video and tell them why the thing is so valuable. On Instagram, I encourage them to swipe up and tell them why the content I’m sending them to is valuable.

Authenticity + Call to Action = Traffic.


Emma Jacquelyn | Emjacquelyn.com

emjacquelyn

1) My name is Emma, I have a fashion and lifestyle blog. I started my blog almost a year ago.

2) There are multiple ways to drive traffic to your blog through social media and other platforms. I include actionable text and clear imagery in my insta stories as well as in my posts such as “if you’re still looking for a holiday outfit, I’ve rounded up 10 must-have holiday looks on the blog 🏻1,2, or 3 which is your fav? ️” in these posts and stories include text to engage your audience to respond.

This can also be done through polls (what they want on the blog next, what blog they’ve liked the most, which outfit option, etc). I also recommend joining Facebook groups where girls share fashion or home decor so you can post outfits (screenshot your Insta post so people can see your handle) when they are asking for ideas or inspiration.

3) Instagram drives the most traffic to my blog.


Can Ahtam | Canahtam.com

Can

1) I have been blogging for about 4-5 years on topics varying from movies to photography and have been utilizing my social media for both organic and paid reach.

I have a wide variety of interests compared to your stereotypical blogger whose particular interest may be in fashion, mommy life, or cars. So I try to write about not only my personal take on things but also some informational and up to date material to keep up with the SEO.

2) As a MARVEL fan, for instance, I do write about reviews of Marvel movies during the heavy traffic times of the movies. I also write about product reviews and criticize and educate on the current influencer market.

The main goal for a blogger is to bring in traffic that sticks and revisits. Whether your blog post is found by a simple Google search (which would be amazing, showing you have strong SEO), or via Social Media, again organic and paid reach.

The secret is consistency as well as relevancy to your audience. Forming a community is challenging when it comes to finding and clicking with those who share the same mindset as you do. For that, you can use your typical and highly related hashtags, geotags, and photo tags so others can find your work and decide to follow you and go deeper into visiting your blog.

3) Although I have touched base on Facebook and Instagram on my previous answer, and of the two Instagram happens to work better since more people are on their mobile phones and Instagram has the most active users between the two; I believe email marketing is a strong tool as well because it feels more personalized as opposed to vague and generic. This, however, should come later as the blogger begins forming and establishing a matured and steadily growing audience for their blog.

Also Read: Blogging Freebies – Blog Freebies for New Bloggers

There are tools such as Klaviyo that allow you to utilize your formed email list to communicate with your audience and keep them up to date. All in all, everything should be consistent in content, context, and time so you can have a wider net to cast to attract your audience.


Lindsey Marx | BestCompany.com

Lindsey Marx

1) I am a content marketing specialist at BestCompany.com. I run several blogs on a variety of topics such as online banking, VoIP, vitamins, and streaming tv.

I also have my own personal blog on health and fitness, professional dancing, and career coaching. I have been blogging for over 8 years.

2) The best ways to attract relevant traffic through social media:

  1. Be authentic
  2. Post daily
  3. Use ahrefs to identify keywords
  4. Utilize google search console to identify trends
  5. Ask your followers for topic advice (take polls)
  6. Keep it relevant
  7. Post infographics to attract attention

3) Linkedin and Instagram bring in the majority of my traffic.


Vince Massara | BookSummaryClub.com

Web Vince wide

1) I’m Vince Massara. I’ve been blogging and writing for over two years.

2) The best way that I get traffic to my site from social media is to write some content that is tailor-made for a particular mode. For example, look at what the higher-performing posts from your niche look like and use that as a base.

3)  Pinterest is the best source of traffic for social media. Pinterest is the only social media platform that people actually visit for the sole purpose of clicking to another site.

Because of this, Pinterest is the only social media platform that doesn’t hide your content that has links in it. Getting traction can be hard, but if you nail it, you’ll be able to get a lot of traffic, even in the beginning when your site is in the sandbox.


John Frigo | MySupplementStore.Com

john frigo my supplement store

1) My name is John Frigo, I’ve been an affiliate marketer and blogger going on 10 years. I’ve also been involved in eCommerce for about the last 7 years.

2) What’s really big right now and great for efficiency is repurposing content so if I write a blog post I’ll turn it into a video for Youtube, I’ll take photos or images from the post and turn that into Instagram content, etc.

3) While most people seem to be on Instagram these days, personally I’m a big fan of Reddit. Reddit can be amazing for driving traffic, however Reddit also hates spam and self-promotion so you have to go about it a certain way or Reddit will roast you.

While not necessarily a traditional social media platform I’ve been having a lot of success as of late driving traffic with blogger.


Shawn Breyer | EastAtlHomeBuyers.com

Shawn Breyer Breyer Home Buyers

1) My wife and I started Breyer Home Buyers with a mission to empower people to enjoy life by simplifying and solving their property issues. My wife and I flip 35+ homes in the metro Atlanta area every year. We generate all of our leads by organically driving traffic to our website via social media and SEO.

2) We use Facebook Live to implement a strategy that Frank Kern has coined Intent Based Branding. We do daily live videos on topics that help people in our niche.

Our goal is to put out a ton of helpful and actionable content that builds goodwill with our audience. With each Live video, we casually make an offer that if they want to work with our company, then head over to our website and fill out the form on the site.

When people land on our site, the traffic is warmer. Since they have an idea of what to expect from our company, they don’t just bounce right off. A decrease in bounce rates and people spending more time on our site tells Google that our site is relevant to the audience landing it.

This has improved our rankings for our site, allowing us to rank in the top three spots for most of the keywords that we are targeting.


Michiel Koers | Blog.topic-cc.nl

michielkoers

1) Michiel Koers, an inbound marketing specialist. I’ve been blogging for about five years now on various websites (sometimes as a ghostwriter for client companies)

2) If you blog, don’t just create a single social media post to announce your new piece. Make sure to squeeze every bit of value from it. So take some interesting quotes from the piece and create social media posts from that. For example: Couple them with different pictures and post those to Facebook. Or use them to create some great Instagram pics. Don’t post these messages all in a row, but post them with a few weeks in between. This way you can promote the same blog post multiple times without posting the exact same thing to your social media accounts.

3) We get the most traffic from Facebook, with LinkedIn coming in as a close second.


Abi Hugo | AbiHugo.com

Abi Hugo

1) I am Abi an Instagram influencer and social media coach. I help small businesses understand and use Instagram to grow their own businesses. My blogging platform is www.abihugo.com/blog and my Instagram account is www.instagram.com/thewhitethistle

2) Listed below are the 3 best ways I drive traffic to my blog:

– Talk about your blog post more than once on your various platforms (personally as I have the biggest audience on Instagram so I bang on about it over there), but I also have my post automatically post to my facebook page (which I then share into my group) and Linkedin.

Only 3% of our audience sees our posts the first time we talk about it. So, the worse thing a blogger can do is hit the post and expect people to come running. People need to see things multiple times.

They also need to be enticed, don’t just say ‘head on over to my blog’ give them a tease of what they will get inside, they need to be excited by the content.

– Use Pinterest – one of the biggest traffic drivers to my site is Pinterest and the best part is I spend about 20 min per week automation my pins using Tailwind and then I can just set it and forget it.

– Lean on your community, make friends on Social Media find people who care about your content and ask them to share it with their followers. It gets your content out of your current circle and in front of new eyes.

3) I have been using Instagram for about 18 months and have grown my account extremely fast and now help other businesses by blogging about social media and other aspects of business.


If this post was too long for you to read it now, you can always bookmark it or Pin it for reading it later.

Time to Take Action!

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As Mahatma Gandhi said, “An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”

In other words: Without action, you don’t go anywhere!

This is why I encourage you to pick 1-2 of the tips that you liked the most and start implementing them today.

My personal suggestion (as many other bloggers & our contributors suggest) would be to try Tailwind today. It’s easy-to-use, no credit card required & offers a 100 free scheduled Pins Plan (plus Tribes) with no time limit.

If you have any other Social Media strategy that drives significant traffic to your blog, I’d be grateful if you share it with us in the comments below!

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