Using Social Cards to Drive Site Traffic

​By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President​

How to Create Engaging Social Cards for Your Web Content

Last week we attended the Digital Transformation Day Online Conference. Important key takeaways were that millennials will make up 50% of the workforce by 2020 (That's less than two years away!) and serving up engaging content to this key group of 18- to 35-year-old consumers is very different than traditional content marketing methods. 

Critical to creating engaging content is promoting it on social with compelling social cards. For example, a study by Facebook reported that users increased traffic from the platform by 250%, simply by using clickable social cards.

Create Engaging Social Cards.

Social Cards are much like memes - photography and/or illustrations with text -  but with compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) and links that can, when created properly, help drive traffic back to your blog, podcast, or video and increase your ROI. On their own, they're tidbits of snackable content such as key statistics, quotes, or takeaways from your blog posts and articles that tease the larger content. They can also promote your business in general and increase brand awareness. 

In order to create social cards you'll need a few tools like either Adobe Creative Cloud or Canva for creating layouts, and Adobe Stock or iStock for sourcing royalty free images and illustrations.  

Here are a few examples of social cards we created:

Ensure Your Social Cards Have Active Links

After you've created the image for your social card, with your specific content and call-to-action, you'll need to ensure that it can be linked back to your site.  If you have a CMS-driven site and are pretty web-savvy, then you can do this with a little work in your website's backend.  If that's not you, then this is where a tool like AnyImage.io really comes in handy. If you have a Wordpress site you'll be able to install a plug-in to interact with the tool and enable it to recognize your domain when creating your social cards. 

Linking a Social Card to Your Web Page

The folks at AnyImage have created this useful infographic (below) to explain exactly how AnyImage works. Enjoy! ​

Courtesy of: AnyImage

Create Multiple Social Cards for One Content Asset 

The important thing isn't so much "how" you create social cards, but rather that you do. The beauty of a tool like AnyImage is that you can create multiple cards for one blog article, podcast, or other piece of content and test the performance of various calls-to-action and images. A/B test to your heart's content! Learn from those tests and adjust your social card designs and accompanying text as you continue to refine your content marketing strategy and tactics.

​Keep creating, testing, sharing, and improving your social cards and you'll see increases in your site traffic and more engagement with your content!

Resources:

1. Adobe Creative Cloud
2. Canva Online Design Tool for Social Cards, Infographics, logos, and more...
3. Adobe Stock for Royalty-Free Images
4. iStock Photo for Royalty-free Images, Illustrations, and Icons
5. AnyImage.io for Custom Social Card Creation

Get social.

By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President​

Julee Klein is the President of Julee Klein Marketing LLC, a full-service digital marketing agency based in Morgan Hill, California. JKM is focused on serving small business owners in the greater Silicon Valley area. You can get in touch with Julee on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @JKMktg

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