Sending People From Social to Your Site

Why links perform poorly

Two reasons, and both are structural rather than a failure of your posting.

Platforms make money from attention on the platform, so a post sending people away is not what they want to distribute.

Posts containing external links are consistently observed to reach fewer people than posts without them.

And separately, somebody scrolling a feed is not in a task-completing frame of mind, so the willingness to click through and read something is low.

Which means a link in a post reaches fewer people and converts a smaller proportion of them.

What to do instead

• Put the useful part in the post, not behind a link.
• Use the phone number, which works without leaving.
• Reserve links for things that genuinely need the site.
• Put the address in a comment where the platform penalises it in the post.
• Keep the profile link current, which is where most clicks come from.

The first is the shift that matters. A post summarising the answer performs better than one teasing it, and the people who want more will find the site regardless.

The profile link

Under-attended and frequently the largest source of clicks a page produces.

Somebody who decides they are interested looks at the profile, and the link there is the route to the site.

Which means it should point somewhere useful rather than only at the homepage.

For a business with one main service, the service page is a better destination. For a seasonal offer, the relevant page.

And it should be tagged so the traffic is identifiable, since profile clicks otherwise arrive looking like direct traffic.

A worked example

A business posting links to their blog posts, with a line teasing the content.

Reach was consistently poor and clicks were minimal.

They changed approach: posting the substance of each piece directly in the post, several sentences of it, with no link.

Reach improved noticeably, since the post no longer sent people away, and engagement rose because the content was actually there.

Traffic to the site fell, and enquiries did not, because the people who were going to enquire did so by phone or by finding the site themselves.

The lesson was that the link had been a measurement of something that was not the objective.

What genuinely needs the site

The cases where a link is worth the cost.

A booking form or an enquiry form that cannot be replicated in a post.

Detailed information somebody needs before deciding, such as full prices or a specification.

Anything requiring a document, a download or a longer read.

And a page that needs to be found later, where the post will have disappeared down a feed and the site is the permanent version.

Outside those, the post can usually do the job by itself.

The link preview

Worth checking once, since it decides how a shared link looks and most businesses have never seen theirs.

When a page address is posted, the platform fetches a title, a description and an image, and displays them as a card.

Those come from the page itself, and where they are missing the platform improvises, frequently badly.

Which produces a shared link showing a logo fragment, no description, and a title reading Home.

Setting them properly is a small piece of work on the site and it applies wherever the link is shared, including by other people.

Worth testing by posting your own address privately and looking at what appears.

The counter-case

Where sending traffic is the point.

A shop, where the sale happens on the site and every click is potentially a transaction.

A business whose website converts well and where the site visit is a necessary step in a considered purchase.

Anybody advertising rather than posting organically, since paid posts are distributed differently and a link is expected.

And a campaign with a specific destination, where the whole purpose is getting people to one page.

For an ordinary local trade page, none of those describes the everyday post.

Making the post work alone

The practical version of everything above, and it changes how posts are written.

Assume the reader will not click anything, and write the post so that it still does its job.

Which means the town, the service and the phone number appear in the post itself rather than being reachable through it.

A photograph of finished work with the words bathroom refit in Port Moody and a number is a complete post; the same photograph with see our website is a fragment.

That also serves the people who see the post without following the page, which for a shared post is most of them.

Measuring what arrives

Worth setting up, since social traffic is otherwise ambiguous.

Traffic from a platform frequently arrives labelled as referral, and sometimes as direct if the link was opened in an app browser.

Which means the figures in your analytics understate it, sometimes considerably.

Tagging the profile link and any links you post makes the traffic identifiable.

And the more reliable measure remains asking people, since somebody who saw a post and phoned two weeks later is invisible to every technical method.

The app browser problem

A technical detail with a practical consequence.

Most platforms open links in a browser inside the app rather than in the phone's own browser.

That browser is more limited: some things behave differently, saved details may not be available, and it is a poorer experience than the ordinary one.

Which is another reason a form completed through a social link converts worse than the same form reached directly.

Nothing can be done about it, and it is worth knowing when comparing conversion rates between sources rather than concluding the traffic is poor quality.

What to change

1. Put the substance in the post.
2. Include the phone number where relevant.
3. Point the profile link somewhere useful.
4. Tag that link so the traffic is identifiable.
5. Use post links sparingly and deliberately.
6. Ask enquiries where they saw you.

The third takes about two minutes and is the single change most likely to produce measurable traffic, because the profile is where anybody who becomes interested actually looks.

How to tag those links is covered in tagging links so you know what worked.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.