How We Quadrupled Social Traffic in 6 Months

With ever-changing algorithms, constant new rules for corporate accounts, restrictions on images, not to mention increasingly savvy audiences, scaling a growing SaaS company’s social reach is hard.

As a brand marketing to other businesses, you need to hit the sweet-spot that marries authenticity and professional know-how. You need your audience on social to find enough value in your posts that they click through. That’s no easy feat when the social users scroll through their feeds at a mile-a-minute.

Tasked with creating order as Social Media Marketing Manager, I set up a post cadence using CoSchedule’s marketing calendar. This was the first step towards achieving our goals of channel growth, increased traffic and engagement, and a defined social marketing vision for the company.

In just six months, we managed to quadruple traffic from our social channels.

This is how it happened:

The path to social success

I created a targeted strategy to divide and conquer that two main goals that every start-up has on social: brand awareness and traffic.

Instead of continuing to allow representatives from all departments to post what they wanted to, when they wanted to, I asked them to pass their post requests along to me and centralized the asks.

The next step was dividing the requests by purpose served.

• Promoting our thought leaders in the eCommerce space
• Spotlighting our partnerships, events, and customers
• Or defining our employer brand as the fun, young company we are

This meant sharing HR posts, Partners posts, event promotion posts and “customer love” posts.

Here are a few examples:

• Developing the ways in which we distribute content
• Turning the blog into a traffic hub
• Attracting industry leaders to our site

To this end, I shared blog posts, eBooks, success stories and actionable UGC strategies:

Here are the results:

Facebook brought in the most traffic, unsurprisingly, since we invest the bulk of our budget in it. On Twitter, we were able to use a smaller budget to get a fair bit of traffic, and on Instagram, we saw solid results from the link in our bio, which I updated every 2 weeks.

What worked and what didn’t

We had the most success with company posts and announcements, like our funding update and HR Recruitathon post.

Funding announcement

Company culture posts

These examples made it clear that social users like to know a bit about the inner workings of a company.  Sharing more than just products or industry news helps your audience relate to the people behind the company and fosters a community of brand fans.

On the flip side, the posts that fared the poorest typically had unclear or less eye-catching images. One of the most important things that I’ve learned from the less successful posts is how much social users rely on images and the tiny bits of text on them to determine whether or not they want to click.

Here are a couple of the posts that didn’t go so well for us:

Top takeaways

Across all the different types of posts we shared for our two major goals, there were three main lessons that stuck out the most:

• Never underestimate the power of visuals: A strong, clear, and understandable image makes the biggest difference. Social users scroll super quickly, and before you can stop their thumbs, you have to catch their eye.
• Take text limitations seriously: Avoid having too much text on social share images. Facebook’s algorithm only allows images with 20% text or less to be boosted. If you don’t boost your posts, only 2% of your followers will see them, and you won’t reach any new audiences.
• Keep your message clear: People need to understand what you’re talking about just from skimming the text on the image. So keep it short and stick to the essentials.
• Share more than what your readers expect: Some our most successful posts gave our audience a glimpse of the inner-workings at Yotpo. That kind of personal, insider content creates meaningful connections on social.

There you have it — the key to our success on social. Now it’s your turn to create a buzz!