Social media is more than just sharing baby pictures or checking out cat videos and what your friends did on vacation. It’s a powerful tool to connect your business with tens of thousands (if not millions) of potential customers.

Another key for social media use for businesses is for driving traffic to your company website. If you’re not using the power of social media to increase blog traffic or grow your business community, you are missing out.

Just having a social media presence doesn’t drive traffic to your website. You need to know how to take advantage of your networks and what to do to increase your connection with possible customers and fans, to draw them to your website.

Share Your Blog

Without any kind of social sharing, marketing your blog or news area on your site can be difficult. Unless you have a strong following and large email list, people won’t know when you post articles or updates.

Facebook and Twitter are excellent ways to share your blog posts. Instantly hundreds of people, who may not normally see your blog, have access to it. You can encourage people to share your blog to their own Facebook and Twitter account and this may bring you even more readers.

With every new share, your blog instantly has access to several hundred, if not several thousand new viewers.

One error that businesses often make is only sharing a blog post once. Social media is about finding and getting in front of people when they are on social media. Sharing a new post when it goes live, later that week, and another time two weeks later is at least minimum sharing that should be done.

Allow Others to Share

A big mistake that business websites often make is failing to make it easy for visitors to share your content. Yes, your business should share your own content, but make it easy for visitors to also share your content by including social media sharing buttons on your blog and news area.

Having the “Like”, “Tweet”, and other social buttons integrated into your blog is a simple but effective way to tap into the power of social media. Social media is about sharing, so make it easy for your people to share.

Communicate and Respond

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, & Google+ are “social” media. There is a social element to all of these pages. It isn’t just about posting a blog link, and that’s it. You want to communicate with others.

If someone posts a comment on your wall, respond to it and do it in a timely manner. This can create an open dialog between you and a potential customer.

Comment and post on other people’s social media accounts. This can generate interest, and potential readers will be exposed to your blog when they check out who followed them and commented.

By simply writing a few posts and tweets on groups and other pages every day, you rev up your visibility and help drive traffic back to your blog.

Create Compelling Content

Last but not least, create content that people want to share. Start with a catchy title and educate or inform people about your product, services or industry.

Your content must be worth sharing before people will add it to their own social media accounts. Use humor or great visuals like infographics and get even more shares.

Use these tips on a consistent and regular basis and your business blog will have more visits and get more traffic!