How To Convert Facebook Followers into Website Traffic

Last updated on Sep 14, 2023

Read More

How To Convert Facebook Followers into Website Traffic

 Leveraging social media, especially Facebook, to increase your reach and engagement is a given these days. Facebook is said to be the most used online social network worldwide with roughly 2.96 billion monthly active users as of Q3 2022. Publishers invest a good amount of time and effort into building a social media presence and increasing their subscriber base on Facebook. This follower count can then be converted into site visitors through various methods. If you are wondering how you can use Facebook to drive traffic onto your news website, try out these options:

Optimizing Your Facebook Page

Your Facebook page for your news website is like the lobby to your building. The lobby often is a representation of what lies inside the entire building, and it’s important to curate it in a manner that is informative to the followers and makes them understand the service you provide. If you are a news website, it is important that your Facebook page reflects that and has a link to your website in the Intro section, About tab, and possibly every other static element on the page that allows it.

facebook_page

It is also important to take advantage of Facebook’s CTA (Call To Action) buttons and optimize your Facebook page to its maximum capacity. Make these buttons lead back to your news website, by activating CTA buttons like ‘Learn More’ or ‘Sign Up’. You can choose to link to resources or contact forms on your website.

Understanding your audience

A very important tool that Facebook offers is the Meta Business Suite. This tool enables the page owner to understand its audience better and know which post works and which doesn’t. For instance, this tool offers details about the age and gender of your followers and the area demographic that they belong to. The Meta Business Suite can be accessed by clicking on the profile logo on the top right corner of the home page. Once inside the Meta Business Suite, head to the Insights tab and click on Audience to know more about your followers. This insight on your followers will help publishers understand what interests their Facebook audience, and then create more content around it. This will help improve the CTR (Clickthrough Rate) and increase traffic on the news website.

facebook insights

The Insights tab in Meta Business Suite also offers details on how your posts work. It will offer data on post reach, which post had the highest engagement, and what kind of media works best on your page. The Insights tab will let you know whether your followers enjoy videos more, or they prefer images with text. All of this information is extremely useful when creating content for Facebook. Apart from sharing videos and images, ensure that links to your website are shared frequently on Facebook as well. Alternatively, if you notice more traction on video or photos, you can add a link in the comments to drive the engaged audience. FB insights postsCreate Ad campaigns

One of the most effective ways to direct your Facebook audience to your site content is by opting for ads. Facebook charges a fee to promote your posts and highlight them to your followers and others. This will not only help direct your followers to the website, but also increase your followers on Facebook itself. There is a Promote button on the right corner of your page that directly takes you to the advertising options. On the promotions page, there is likely to be an option to create automated ads, or a manual one using text or photos. Automated ads adjust over time to help you get better results, while manually created ads do not offer that flexibility.

Facebook Ads for website traffic

While creating a manual ad, Facebook will ask you your goal. The admin needs to choose from options like get more website visitors, get more calls, or get more messages. As we are looking to increase traffic on the news website, the ‘get more website visitors’ is an apt option for this specific instance. You can then go ahead and decide the ad creative by choosing the media, description, the action button, and add the website URL. The admin will have the option to choose a daily budget for the ad and decide for how many days they wish to run the ad. Once the payment is made, Facebook will start promoting your posts and the results of how the ad is performing can also be seen inside Meta Business Suite.

Facebook creating ads

Posting engaging content on Facebook

While having a decent following is a plus, keeping them interested is an uphill task. Posting engaging content to grab the attention of your audience is extremely important. Making creatives specifically for Facebook is necessary and should be taken seriously. Just posting a link with some text will not help all the time. A graphic to showcase what the link is talking about would be a good way to engage the Facebook audience and get them to click on the link. The publisher could also extract some important quotes from the story and highlight it on Facebook to grab the followers’ attention. For instance, if you’re posting a link of a celebrity interview, extracting one of the key things said by the person could help in getting those precious clicks on the website.

Posting Engaging Content

Posting content on Facebook in different formats

As a digital news website, it is important to publish news in different formats. This needs to be followed on Facebook as well. Apart from the text and link format to post on Facebook, a publisher could experiment by sharing video posts to grab the audience’s attention. Using hashtags to increase reach, making infographics to help simplify a complicated topic, and doing live videos from the reporting ground could also help increase follower count and eventually convert into website clicks. The publisher can create a poll for more engagement, or even a GIF to express themselves in an eccentric manner.

 

Using Push Notifications on Messenger

Apart from all of these tools, sending out push notifications to your followers every time you update your RSS feed is a highly effective way to increase traffic using your Facebook audience. Tools like Messenger Push Notifications help in sending messages to your followers without any manual work. For instance, if a user comments on a post, an automated opt-in message is sent to this person on Messenger, asking them to subscribe to notifications. Once the user has subscribed, they keep getting articles in their chat box in a carousel format to read, click, and even share on Facebook and WhatsApp. This push notifications service keeps sending articles to subscribed followers after a fix interval regularly, enabling a significant increase in traffic from Facebook followers.

Facebook Messenger Push Notifications

Different social media tactics work for different business pages. You’ve got to find a mix that works for you and helps you take advantage of your abundant Facebook audience and turn them into site visitors.

All Posts
Tasneem Akolawala
Tasneem Akolawala
Tasneem Akolawala has been a senior journalist with over 10 years of experience. Over the years, she has tracked tech news, covered live events, reviewed gadgets, and wrote features. She has worked with Zee Media, Time Out, BGR India, and NDTV in the past. In her free time, she loves to read fiction, DIY things, and binge on Netflix.

Related Posts

What is Comscore? What is it Used for?

The primary focus of news publishers or advertisers today is to attrac[...]

Behind the Headlines: Election Reporting Tips for News Publishers

The year 2024 approaches as the most vital election year in India, new[...]

Effective Video Revenue Models for News and Media Publishers

Videos are one of the fastest-growing and most popular forms of conten[...]