What makes you click?

Do you want to increase engagement in your business?

Generating traffic to your website is a sure-fire way of increasing engagement in your business, and social media continues to be a go to format for generating that traffic.

To generate traffic from social media you need to get people clicking on your links. Here we’re going to look at some of the best ways to write social media posts that get clicks.

Headlines

A general rule for generating clicks is to write your updates like headlines. Short, punchy updates that generate a curiosity from the reader will help draw a click. Known as the ‘curiosity gap’, you want to arouse the person’s interest between what they know and what they want to know, compelling them to click.

Case Study: The Replace Base

An online retailer of mobile device repairs and replacement parts

Research shows that the difference in conversion between a well-written headline and a bad one is 73%! So how can you write a social media update that generates 73% more clicks?

Here are 5 ways:

1. Pose your updates as questions
   Questions are a good way of enticing a click because they heighten the curiosity gap. Research shows that simply seeing a question mark stimulates your brain. A direct question is even more likely to generate a click. The use of ‘you’ and ‘your’ or ‘they’ and ‘their’ helps to stimulate a person’s self-interest and creates a personal attachment to the person reading your update.
2. Top 5s, Top 10s
   As people continue to be exposed to more and more information, the need for easily digestible content becomes more important. Posing your updates as ‘Top 5s’ ‘Top 10s’ etc. gives the person an impression of quick and informative information, increasing their likelihood of clicking. For instance, I could post an update on social media linking to this article as the ‘Top 5 ways to generate website traffic through social media’ or ‘5 top tips for creating attention grabbing social media updates’.
3. Why
   ‘Why generating website clicks is easier than you thought’
   ‘Why social media clicks are easy’
   The use of the word ‘why’ again generates a curiosity and an intrigue, increasing the likelihood of a click. It’s also that promise of something good to come. You’re telling the person reading your update that “they will learn something beneficial by clicking this link.”
4. How to
   Affixing a ‘how to’ to an update is another way of stimulating interest in a person’s clicking finger. Similar to ‘why’, the notion of learning something new will stimulate interest because it’s value adding to the recipient. An example for this article could be: How to win on social media.
5. Be negative
   Research by Outbrain reveals that the average click through-rate on headlines with negative superlatives was 63 per cent higher than positive ones. Maybe I should have written this article as ‘How not to generate website traffic through social media’.

Need help with social media? Want to increase traffic to your website? Contact us if we can help you with anything mentioned in this blog post.