This post originally appeared on the Small Business Milwaukee blog. Learn more about Small Business Milwaukee here.

Driving web traffic is one of the greatest challenges that small businesses experience. Sure, it’s great to have an online presence (in fact, it’s pretty much a necessity these days), but getting eyeballs to your online store is the next step.

Done right, posting on social media is a pretty simple way to drive traffic without a major time investment. Here are a few ways to consider:

1. Share your own content. Then share it again.

If you’re creating quality content, it’s up to you to make sure people see it, right? One of the major mistakes that I see businesses make is treating your content like a single line on a task list. Create content? Check. Share it? Check.

The key is to share it again. Test different text, use different hashtags, quote the article, ask questions, whatever works. Make sure you go back and take a look at how much interest each tweet or post got to identify trends. If asking questions works, do it more often. You get the picture.

2. Give yourself more links.

I’m not saying to load up all of your content with links back to your website or content (because that definitely gets annoying), but when you discuss content that you’ve already covered in a blog, or talk about a strategy that you discuss on your website, feel free to link back to that content. It will keep readers on your site longer and help set you up as a thought leader in your industry.

3. Share photos.

Sharing photos and infographics on any social media site will get more interaction. Viewers are drawn to photos and the more engaging, the better! Here is a great article that details how to get more shares and likes with visuals on each social media platform. Need free stock photos to add to your posts? Check out these 7 sites.

4. Sponsor your content.

Have a little bit of money to sink into getting more eyeballs on your content? Instead of doing traditional Facebook or PPC advertising, just sponsor your posts after you’ve analyzed which is most popular (like we discussed in number 1).

• Promoting posts on Facebook: They call it “boosting” posts, and it’s a super-simple way to make sure more of your audience sees each post. In fact, since Facebook last changed their algorithm, it’s one of the best ways to increase engagement. Read more here.
• Promoting posts on Twitter: Promoting tweets is a relatively new feature, but Twitter is showing that it works. You can target your audience by keywords, geography and more. Read more about promoting tweets here.

How much of your web traffic comes from social media? Are you using any creative techniques that we didn’t cover here? Be sure to leave a comment below! If you're looking to build an advanced social media presence, you can check out our blog on that topic.