Driving more traffic from Facebook

When we post stories that we know are going to be popular with our Facebook fans, it’s fun to see the comments pile up on our Facebook walls here at The Palm Beach Post. And our involvement with social media has benefits that go beyond driving traffic – awareness, community, marketing, trust, story sourcing and more.

However, when possible, it’s worth asking our fans to click the link that we’re promoting and go to our site.

Doing so benefits not only us – in terms of pageviews and visitor counts – but also our readers because once they’re on our site, they get more information and can click around to related content.

Here are some examples that show the difference between Facebook posts that encourage readers to click link vs. those that don’t:

Good information, but no reason to click:

This post resulted in only 10 clicks from Facebook, or 1.2 percent of its referring traffic, SiteCatalyst shows.

Most of the information that readers would want to know was included in the post, giving them little reason to click for more.

Slightly on the dull side:

This post got 6 clicks from Facebook, which was 1.4 percent of the story’s referring traffic.

In cases like these, it helps to scan the story for an interesting tidbit and tease to that information to give readers a reason to click and read.

Saving some for the story

Now, let’s look at how we can boost Facebook traffic by wording status updates to encourage readers to click.

The top part of this update lets readers know they have to click on the link to read about this boater’s ordeal at sea.

It also helps to ask readers to share stories like this with their friends, as was done above. Studies show that social-media users share heartwarming and good-news stories with their networks.

This post got 104 clicks from Facebook, which was 5.1 percent of its referral traffic – nearly quadruple the referral traffic of the two non-click-me examples above.

Encourage them to click

This was a good story to put on Facebook and to promote in general, since our web readers are always eager for news about food, restaurants and grocery stores. Plenty of people commented on this post and interacted right on the Facebook wall (click the image above to see the live post).

But by encouraging fans to go to the story for more details, we got 171 clicks from Facebook, which was 5.7 percent of its referral traffic – about four and a half times the amount of referral traffic of the non-click-me examples above.

Alas, no formula’s perfect

Given what we’ve seen, you’d think this post below would have driven good referral traffic:

This one got only 53 clicks from Facebook, only 1.1 percent of the story’s referral traffic. That was partly because other sites were already driving traffic to this particular article, including FloridaTrend.com, so they edged out Facebook referrals.

But it’s also because our Facebook fans seemed to want to comment on and debate about the story right on the Facebook wall (click on the image above to see all the comments).

The takeaway here is that readers aren’t robots that we can perfectly predict.

Still, paying attention to “display type” in Facebook and other social media channels is as worthwhile as writing good homepage and newspaper headlines.

Related Articles

• The Creation and Promotion of Social Content (searchenginejournal.com)
• Metrics – How We Love And Hate Them (blacknight.com)
• Facebook & Twitter Gaining Ground on Google in Video Referrals (readwriteweb.com)
• Facebook And Twitter Driving Referral Traffic (webpronews.com)
• How Social Sharing Spreads News (searchenginepeople.com)
• Social Media Helps Drive Traffic, Engagement at NewsHour (pbs.org)