You know what SEO keywords are and how they work. You know that overusing a keyword can cause your post to look repetitious and elementary. You know social media can greatly impact the traffic a website gets. But do you know, in depth, how to best utilize these social media forms? It is more than posting a link and having members of the internet audience click on it. It is time to delve deeper into what works for driving traffic to your website using social media.

3 Underused Social Media Platforms that Works in Driving Traffic

YouTube impacts in driving traffic

YouTube is an immensely popular website, but can it be used for gaining more traffic to your site? An interesting thought. Not usually categorized as “social media,” YouTube can be a useful tool in driving more traffic to your website.

Google uses SEO keywords in a complex algorithm of words and signals. YouTube does the same thing, just not to Google’s extent. When uploading an advertorial video or informational video to YouTube it is obvious you want one thing, for people to watch it. There are hundreds of people uploading videos at any given moment. What is going to make your video stand out? Here are some of the top ways to “code” your video in order to gain hits and in turn website traffic.

YouTube’s algorithm involves:

• How many likes and dislikes are on the video
• How long each viewer watches the video for
• Tags and tags in the description
• Number of comments
• Who subscribes after watching the video

Creating a video that utilizes YouTube’s unique signals and creating a link in the description to your website as well as embedding the video on the website itself will lead to higher traffic.

Pinterest is a winner for driving traffic that sticks! 

This is another site that is not quite “social media,” but that should not be ignored entirely either. Pinterest is an up-and-coming way to reach articles through links from the photos and images the user’s search pulls up. As with YouTube, post-ers should keep a few things in mind that are special to Pinterest and will drive traffic to their website or blog.

• Why should someone Pin your post?
• Use your Boards to your advantage
• Always, always use images when creating a post, a picture of text will not draw anyone in
• Creating a contest on your blog will increase traffic, not something Pinterest is usually for but as with Instagram, people will “re-pin” or “re-post” if there is something in it for them
• Engage on Pinterest, if you are not interacting with other users your blog will become stagnant and therefore useless

Business owners as well as website owners may not see Pinterest as a way to market and drive traffic towards their respective blogs and sites because of the stereotypes society has created regarding Pinterest. It is not all wedding, fashion, and cooking. As of late, new, important, newsworthy Pins have been increasing, making Pinterest an interesting and effective way to gain a following.

Twitter shouldn’t be left behind in traffic generation

Lastly, we come to Twitter. Most companies have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, so to speak, they have created their Twitter profiles and have begun gathering a following. The thing that is similar between Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube is that most websites fail to use these popular modes of communication. Using Twitter to gain website traffic is not the first thought an SEO expert would think. Twitter has a reputation of being superficial and not taken seriously, but it’s time to disprove those thoughts.

When creating a tweet to essentially “market” your business or your website, it is easy to create a lengthy definition of a product with links and exclamation points and loud, all-capital phrases. Don’t do this. Use simple language and make the tweet short and sweet. Anything under 100 characters will be read more than a long, verbose and let’s face it, useless tweet.

Do not be afraid of the hashtag. Create a hashtag that relates to your business and in every tweet, use it! This allows twitter users who want to know more about you, your website, and your company to type in or click on said hashtag and read everything you have tweeted as well as reach your twitter profile and in turn your website.

While these may not seem like the typical ways of driving traffic to your website, they are effective. Oftentimes instead of coming up with a time-consuming plan to gain viewers, the simplest solution can be right in front of you. Use the resources that are available to you.