If you’re anything like us, you work hard to build your Facebook audience and keep them engaged. You also probably put in considerable effort behind the scenes to keep website traffic up. But who says these two tasks have to be mutually exclusive endeavors?
Facebook is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website – as long as you follow a few simple best practices. Consider these tips the next time you publish a link from your website to your business page.
Make Your Content Useful
Some businesses worry that Facebook penalizes link posts for directing users off of its platform. However, given how Facebook’s algorithm works, there is no reason to assume that quality links will tank your page’s engagement rate. The caveat here is this: as with any other type of post, uninteresting or unhelpful content doesn’t cut it – especially with link posts. In Facebook’s effort to crack down on clickbait, links that don’t provide value lose their momentum fast. If people click on your link only to come immediately back to Facebook, your post will quickly get demoted. We really can’t say this enough – providing value to your audience by knowing who they are and what they want is key.
Evaluate Your Website
Another important part of making link posts work for you is making sure that your website is optimized in the first place. Research has found that 40% of users give up on a website after only 3 seconds of delay. Facebook won’t downgrade your content just because it includes a link, but if that link connects to a website with a particularly slow load time you’re likely to see reach and link clicks drop.
Use the Link Preview
The image and headline that populate automatically when you paste a URL into the “create post” box is your link preview. When it’s published, a user can click anywhere on the photo or gray link headline box below it, and they will be redirected to your website. If link clicks are your goal, keeping the link preview as part of your post is the way to go. According to Agorapulse, link clicks on posts with a link preview can be up to 44.9% higher than on posts that simply include a URL in the post copy. Bonus: when you post with a link preview, you can clean up your post copy by deleting the URL.
Shorten Your Post Copy
Keep in mind that 98.2% of Facebook users access the platform from mobile devices. This means that you have approximately 3 lines of text (or somewhere around 130 characters) to employ before your post copy gets cut off by a “see more” link. Make this section count! Cutting to the chase from the beginning will increase the odds that your followers will take action on your post.
Use a UTM Tracker
Finally, it’s important to be able to understand whether your efforts on Facebook are giving you desired results on your website. Tracking the quality of your web traffic is paramount for understanding whether your link posts are working as you intend them to. Use a custom URL builder to tag your links so that you know what kind of actions your audience is taking once they arrive on your website.
These are simple but effective tactics you can employ to make Facebook link posts work for you.
Users share in excess of 26 billion links per year on Facebook.
Are you getting the results you want from your social media marketing? KWSM can help. We develop a fully customized strategy based on your unique needs, and then we execute your social media marketing strategy on a daily basis.
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