A lot of people make a website for a number of purposes. Whether it’s to post their creative output online or sell products and services, a challenge that all websites face is how to gain reasonable traffic to their site.

With the rise of social networking sites, people’s behavior when it comes to how they use the Internet has changed. For content creators, this opens up new avenues to help them advertise their websites.

Here are a few things to do to leverage social media to drive website traffic.

Keep your language visual

People are highly visual by nature; most social media sites take advantage of that from the way that visual content is placed on their websites to its proportions in comparison to the accompanying text. Their formulas work; most social media posts that have high engagement usually have images accompanying them.

Take the following for example: a blogger posts a review about a makeup product. Without showing the actual product and how it applies on the face, that makeup review will most definitely receive a very low level of engagement. This is why when making a blog post or even a post on social media, sharing a picture will catch people’s attention more and will drive more traffic to a site.

Follower count matters

Let’s face it, nobody really cares about a personality or brand that does not have a lot of followers. A social media personality that does not have a lot of followers is less likely to receive sponsorships or partnerships with other personalities or brands than someone who has say, a million followers on social media.

Building a solid follower count takes a lot of hard work, but it also takes some smart perception management. Of course, creating quality content means that it will be easier to draw a crowd in, but tweaking posts to seem more popular will help make gaining more followers easier. One way to do that is to buy Instagram followers; this will help push those social media lurkers into finally being added to the follower count.

Don’t just advertise, engage!

A lot of times, content creators use social media without unlocking its full potential. They may create new content on their website and then post on Instagram inviting their followers to “click the link in my bio” to see the content.

While it may work for a few members of their audience, it won’t drive a high amount of followers to the website and generate the buzz they want. Self-promotion only works for a short period of time; sooner or later, the lack of engagement will drive the audience to unfollow the brand or flock to more engaging competitors.

Captioning Instagram posts with questions that the audience can answer can help drive engagement and make the audience more likely to visit the brand’s site. Additionally, taking advantage of Instagram Story’s tools like polls, ask a question, and direct linking to websites (for business accounts only) will help drive engagement and allow more traffic to be directed to a brand’s site.

Make your content shareable

Of course, driving more traffic to a website also means that the content has to be highly mobile. What this means is that the content a blogger or an influencer makes has to be easily shared by audiences on their social media.

Using social media plugins and buttons, and strategically placing them on the areas of a website that most viewers click on is a great way to ensure that when a viewer likes what they are seeing or reading, they can share it on their own social media and encourage others to do the same. Shareability of content allows a content creator to gain a higher level of engagement without doing a lot of effort; they let their audience do it for them.