So, Instagram.
The breast milk of Generation Z and the playground of millennials.
The birthplace of influencers.
The fastest growing social media platform out there.
Its over 1 billion users amount to the population of North and South America combined.
Great, but can you make money out of it?
Yes. In fact, many already are.
By many, I mean:
- Online stores
- Booking platforms
- Digital marketing companies
- Content writing agencies
- Influencers
- News sites
- Every business with a decent content marketing plan
The goal is a little thing called referral traffic.
What Is Referral Traffic?
The “recommendation” link
If you own or run a website, then you know what Google Analytics is.
Analytics uses three statistic metrics to track the traffic coming to your site:
- Search traffic — visits from a search engine
- Direct traffic — direct visits to your website URL
- Referral traffic — a “friendly recommendation” from another site/platform
In web traffic, a “referral” basically means another website is recommending your content. It is a strong indicator for the most valuable external sources that help you get the traffic you want. It also shows consumer intent (but that is a topic for another time).
You are part of referral traffic each time you click on a hyperlink that takes you to another page of a different website.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could somehow stimulate said referral traffic for your own website?
Social Media and Referral Traffic
We can’t all be famous
One of the main benefits of social media for businesses is that they get to generate referral traffic to their websites without having to rely solely on guest posting and brand credibility (a.k.a. being as awesome as Neil Patel so people just link to your site because you’re cool and famous… and smart).
The non-Neil Patel-s of this world, need to break a sweat to get to the sweet mecca of grand brand following. Yes, you’ll probably need to hire writers for that.
And then there was Instagram…
Getting Traffic from Instagram
There’s good and bad news
The bad news is there is just one place where you can leave a clickable link on your Instagram profile, and that is your bio section. So, whenever you want to generate traffic to your newest blog post, product offer, website, etc., you need to change your bio.
The good news is that if you have at least 10K followers on your account, people can get a link straight from your story.
Yep, whoever is watching your Instagram stories can just swipe up for a link
… and land wherever you want them to go.
The catch, of course, is getting those 10K followers. For that, you will need a solid, long-term Instagram content strategy that you consistently follow.
The Study
Get some perspective from the numbers
Let’s start with the frequency of posting.
Back in 2017, Tailwind conducted an original study where they analyzed over 100K Instagram posts for a period of three months. The goal was to see how the frequency of posting relates to likes, follower growth, and engagement rate.
In a nutshell, they found that:
- 7+ posts a week can generate up to 1195.2% increase in likes as opposed to less than one post a week.
- 100%+ increase in the number of your posts, can get you a 19% increase in engagement rate.
- The more you post, the faster your following grows – from 14% with 1 post per week or less, to 56% with 7+ posts per week.
- Only 5% of the accounts in the study posted new content daily.
In conclusion,
there’s a 95% chance that your Instagram profile can bring you more conversions if you resolve to posting daily as opposed to every once in a while.
I’ll let those numbers sink in for a sec. You might want to hire writers for all that content you are yet to post, and you wouldn’t be wrong to consider it.
HOWEVER, just because you suddenly have to post that much more content, it doesn’t mean you should turn your feed into a poorly curated fake news platform. Nobody actually benefits from that.
It is all about creating value. Or, shall I say VALUE?
If you’re currently busy rethinking your entire social media marketing strategy based on the numbers up there, how about we catch a break?
Great! Don’t be long now, we’re yet to go over the Instagram content strategy you will need with all the colors and palettes and girly things essentially.
Catch you later, alligators!
