You’ve setup your social media accounts, identified the best times to engage with your audience and created a schedule for sharing content. Maybe you’ve decided that instead of just sharing your own content that you’ll also share interesting articles from other websites as well. While this may be a great way to build relationships with influencers in the industry, it can be difficult to explain to management about the value add of such activity.
Social sharing of third party content means that you are sending your audience to other websites so you’re losing out on traffic, leads and ultimately sales for your company. However, there is a quick and simple way to optimise the social media traffic you send to third party websites.
Introducing ‘Sniply’
At the Digital Marketing Institute we recently started to use Sniply; a link-shortening tool that allows you to attach a call-to-action to every link you share through your social media channels.
While there have been many link-shortening tools in recent times such as Bit.ly, Sniply allows you to drive additional traffic and conversions to your website that you may have otherwise lost out on. If you take a look at this article, we shared it through our Twitter account as we thought it would be highly relevant to our Twitter audience. In order to maximise the value of sharing this piece, we used Sniply to add a newsletter CTA at the bottom of the page to encourage people to signup to our mailing list.
Let’s Get Snipping
To get started, identify the article you wish to share via your social media channels. In the example below I’ve chosen a recent article by Adam Houlahan on the importance of timing your tweets to when your audience are most engaged. As this is a perfect fit for the audience of our Twitter account, I’m going to share it with our devoted followers.
Firstly, add the link to the ‘Create Snip’ box at the top of your screen when you’re logged into your Sniply account.
If this is your first time creating a Snip, you will need to set up a template for the call-to-action (CTA) you’re going to use for any shortened links.
Have you thought about what action you would like your social media audience to take?
- Maybe you’d like to encourage people to signup to your newsletter,
- checkout a specific landing page on your website
- or take a follower another social media account of yours that is struggling to get traction?
Begin by entering a strong message that will act as your call-to-action:
Are you sending people to a page on your website? Enter the link into the ‘Button URL’ box.
*Top Tip* – Add Custom Campaign parameters to your URLs by using Google’s URL builder tool. This will allow you to track in Google Analytics the volume of traffic and leads you’re generating through the Sniply CTAs you add to your links. N.B If you purchase the Business Sniply plan, you can connect 3rd party analytics platforms which will eliminate the need to do this.
Next you need to choose the styling of your CTA so it matches the branding of your website:
Begin by clicking the ‘Customize’ button which will bring up the options to change the colour and styling of your CTA, as well as the company logo you wish to have displayed to users. When you’re happy with the design of your template then click ‘Create’ which will then provide you with a Sniply shortening link to share across any of your social media accounts. You will then be able to select this CTA template the next time you create a Sniply shortened link to save time.
How Much Does It Cost?
If you want to try out the features offered by Sniply, the company offers a free basic package that allows you to create an unlimited number of shortened links, 100 conversions per month and one user profile per account.
However, if you want to fully customise the branding of your CTAs to match your website, you will need to upgrade to the PRO Plan which costs a reasonable $19 a month. Do you work within a social media team? You can collaborate on tagging up links and measuring the success of them as the PRO Plan allows you to have 5 user profiles per account. The intuitive analytics dashboard allows you to easily see all of the shortened links you have created to-date, how many clicks they have received and the number of conversions generated from each of these links.
However, Sniply isn’t without its limitations. As the tool is dependant on iframe technology to load web pages in the background, you may encounter some websites that use high security settings to prevent the loading of them. From personal experience of using the product over the past two months, I have found that 99% of all of the websites I’ve encountered have not blocked the use of the product.
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