Get More Clicks on Your Next Post: 7 Ways to Increase Social Media CTR

Still not getting a good click through rate (CTR) on your social media posts? As a start-up, you’re probably using social media to drive traffic to your website, build your email list or encourage webinar sign-ups. But it’s not easy to get people to take action. It’s a story many of us digital marketers know too well: you spend hours creating great content, only to post it on social media and find that your audience isn’t taking action. You’re probably sick of spending time and money creating posts and ads that just aren’t performing. Well in this article, we are going to help you out with 7 tips to boost social media CTR on your upcoming posts. Let’s get started!

What is Your Social Media CTR?

Your social media CTR is a metric that measures how many click through onto your site after viewing your social media post. It helps you to determine the effectiveness of your social media marketing by quantifying the percentage of your audience who take action and visit your website or turn into a lead. It’s essentially the conversion rate for your content: how many people have you “converted” from impressions to clicks. This means that you need to actively optimise your CTR if you want your digital marketing to be effective.

 This is something we all crave as business owners. After all, there has to be some ROI for the time we spend strategising and designing a social media calendar, right?

 Notably, your social media CTR relates to both paid ads and organic posts. Although increasing your CTR is super important when optimising a paid campaign to make sure you’re extracting as much value as possible and reducing the average cost per lead, you should be considering your CTR on every single post that you make.

 As a start-up, you’re probably strapped for cash. The best way to rival established businesses is to optimise everything you post on social media for maximum engagement and action. Compared to email marketing and search ads, social media will provide you with a far greater ROI. This means you should be calculating the CTR or all of your social media posts, not just ads. That’s the best way to determine what kind of content your audience is responding to and stop wasting time on posts that aren’t working!

How to Calculate My CTR?

To measure your CTR, you’ll need to divide your total number of post impressions by the total number of clicks. Importantly, you’ll need to determine what your goal is: what page do you want your audience to click through to? This could include:

• Website visits
• Profile visits
• Account likes or follows
• Email submissions

 For instance, if your Facebook ad creates 500 impressions and 5 clicks to your website, your CTR would be 1%. Or on Instagram, if the image you post gets 1000 impressions and generates 20 profile visits, your CTR would be 2%.

 If you’re measuring actions taken on a regular post to your feed (i.e. not an ad), you may need to do a bit of extra work to measure your CTR. You can use the insights natively build into the social media platform you’re using to see your post reach, but you won’t be able to determine how many people have clicked on the link. So, it may be helpful to set up a UTM code to track your URLs.

What is a Good CTR?

Determining whether you have a good CTR can often be achieved by comparing your performance to the average CTR in your industry. As with most things in digital marketing, it’s all relative and will differ amongst different industries. It will also depend on whether people are coming across your posts via organic reach, display ads or search engine results.

However, as a rough guide, google ad campaigns receive an average CTR of 1.91% on search and 0.35% on display. A good CTR on an average Facebook post might range from 0.5% to 1.5%.

Regardless, it doesn’t really matter what is considered “good”. No matter what your CTR is, you’ll want to improve it. You shouldn’t worry about what is considered good in your industry, just focusing on achieving the best CTR possible for your business. It’s about getting more clicks from more people.

7 Ways to Improve the CTR on Your Next Social Media Post

 Here are some of the top ways you can increase your social media CTR. We highly recommend you follow these tips right away!

1. Where’s the Hook?

 What do most people do when they are bored on a social media platform? They scroll through the feed subconsciously. Therefore, you need to create thumb-stopping content. Your social media posts should hook the users right from the start and keep them engaged. It’s all about capturing the attention of the audience through your ad copy. You could:

• Use vibrant imagery
• Pose a rhetorical question
• Point out a common problem
• Offer something for free

The hook is really important because it will put your users in the right mindset. You can’t just ask them to click on the link straightaway… If there’s no reason for them to take action, they’ll just scroll past the post. Hooking the audience in with something attention-grabbing will give you the opportunity to ease them into the action: you can pose the problem that your audience is facing and explain why you’re the best solution. Provide your audience with something of value and they’ll reward you by clicking on your link. This will help boost your CTR.

2. Speak Your Mind

 While you probably want to create well-polished, branded content for your social media posts, it’s also important that they have some personality. Social media is all about connecting people, so act like a person! Your audience will want to consume content that aligns with their values and truly connects with their humanity.

 So, make your content more personal by sharing your thoughts and adding your two cents. Nobody wants to interact with a robot, so be casual and relatable, make them laugh or offer your opinion. Creating this kind of intimacy will likely attract the attention of your audience and build enough trust to turn views into clicks!

3. Craft the Perfect Headline

 Your post’s headline is probably the most crucial element of the post. They’ll definitely affect your CTR because it’s something that your audience quickly consumes to understand the context of the post. Keep your headlines short and to the point. It should catch the attention of your audience and draw them in for more. You can achieve this by:

• Determining the value that your audience might receive by reading the post
• Highlighting a problem that your audience is facing
• Summarising the key message that you want to communicate

5. Time Your Posts to Perfection

 You also need to think about when you post your content, as this will definitely impact your CTR. If you post at the wrong time, all the work that you put into creating an awesome post will go to waste.

 You need to get your post in front of people when they have the time and opportunity to see it AND take action. It’s obvious that you shouldn’t post your content when your audience is likely to be offline, such as when they’re sleeping or at work. But you also need to consider when your audience is most likely to take the action that you’re asking them to take… They’re unlikely to read a long blog post when they’re tired late at night, or they might be less likely to buy something when they’re on the bus on their way to work.

This will really depend on your target market, your industry and what your intention is. But as a guide, check your insights to see when your followers are active. Use this as a starting point, but continually test out different times. Figure out what works, then repeat. Posting in primetime will also help you to get more engagement on your posts!

6. Encourage Comments & Likes

Posts with higher engagement will go on to generate a higher CTR. This is because it provides social proof: if your audience sees that other people have enjoyed your content, they’ll be more susceptible to following your call-to-action.

Think about your own actions on social media… What’s more likely to get your attention: a post with 2 likes and 0 comments, or a post with 50 likes and 20 comments?

 Posts with a lot of comments will also tend to retain users for a longer period. They’ll spend time reading through some of the comments and might even be inspired to leave a comment of their own.

7. Craft a Strong Call-to-Action

 Finally, when your audience is finished consuming your content, don’t let them scroll away! You’ve got their attention and provided them with some value. This is the perfect time to drive their attention toward something that you want them to do, whether it be:

• Visiting a landing page
• Reading a blog post
• Signing up to your email list
• Watching a video

The best way to encourage this kind of action is to just ask! Craft a call-to-action that tells your audience what they should do and why they should do it. Giving strong and clear directions is one of the best ways to boost your social media CTR. After all, if you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it.

For the greatest impact, you should focus on detailing the benefit that your audience will receive by following your advice: explain why your audience should care. For example, a selfish call-to-action will not be effective because it only talks about your business: “Click here to view our video production services.” Instead, focus on the value that you provide to your customer: “Increase your conversions with a high-impact, sales-focused video”.

Wrapping Up

There you have it. In this post, we have shared some of the most effective ways to increase your social media CTR. Given the difficulty of attracting attention on social media through organic reach, you need to be patient when implementing these strategies. Even when scaling social media ads, you will need to wait until you have enough data to make a definitive decision. It will take time to optimise your processes and figure out what works for you.

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