The best way to drive traffic to your website using social media is in using blog posts. Create a blog on your website, and write interesting articles pertaining to the product or service that you wish to promote. Then create a "teaser" post on your social media, with a link to the blog - and then link the blog to a page on your site that is dedicated to that product or service.

For example, if you wanted to promote a water filtration system: First create a page that tells the benefits of your filtration system. Then create a blog page about how dangerous public water can be when consumed unfiltered, and title the blog "Greensburg (example) Water Filtration." In the closing of the blog, say "Click here to get CLEAN water...," taking the user to that product page. Then create a post with a picture of a parasite zoomed in, with a caption that lists all of the bacteria, additives, and such that is found in our public water system. Add a link to the post that says something like, "Click here to see what's in YOUR water!"

This will create relative traffic to your website for "Greensburg water filtration." The more traffic generated to the blog, the more prominence is given to the blog page and service page; which in turn will rank your website higher on both the social media platform, as well as the search engines.

Boosting posts or doing Facebook ads are both a good way to gain exposure to the post itself. The problem with paid programs is that the activity generated is NOT qualified traffic. In fact, you will probably notice that the majority of it is coming from India or somewhere outside of your service area. This means that you will gain that exposure, however they are not likely to be potential customers, and it will not improve your prominence.

It has been my experience that most people use paid options because they do not know how to drive relative traffic naturally. It is the same as people thinking that they need to buy AdWords in order to rank high on Google. Once you understand how it works, then you will find that it works much better than just throwing money at it.