10 Tips for using Social Media to Convert Customers
You need a loyal community of engaged followers. Engaging followers is a way to build personal relationships and drive trust with your prospects and customers. Interact with your customers in the comment section because it’s a great way to inspire them to communicate with you and it only takes less than an hour daily.
If your favourite celebrity replied to your comment on social media, you would be surprised, touched and more motivated to return to their page, it’s the same with social media. When you reply, you’re not only engaging customers, you’re building a loyal network. Share content from your users on your channel using a hashtag that promotes your brand. 85% of social media users feel that User Generated Content (UGC) is more effective than brand posts. It also generates more online conversions than websites or social media marketing campaigns without it.
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Kit up with the Right Tools
Consistency is non-negotiable in social media because your marketing efforts depend on it. Consistency keeps you in the mind of your audience and what you’re offering them. You can’t spend all day on social media or you’ll burn out so employ friendly tools like Buffer, HootSuite and Meet Edgar to do some of the work for you. Create content in batches and schedule your post ahead of time.
A great tool for tracking conversion is Kissmetrics that allows you to track visitors to your website from social media and the rate of conversion from each platform. Such data lets you know if your efforts are working or failing and where to make changes or focus your attention.
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Develop Relationship with Influencers in your Niche
Its’ tough in the beginning, especially when you don’t have a lot of social media followers. You can’t generate sales without a robust audience and a proven way to increase your follower base is to connect with influencers on social media.
Marketers use cross-promotions to grow each other’s following by mentioning a brand in a post. YouTube sensation Zoella was able to sell almost 80,000 of her first book using social media connections. Its’ a tip anyone can use, not just big brands. A Google studyrevealed that 60% of YouTube subscribers said they would make an online purchase based on recommendation from a content creator.
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Use the Mere-exposure Effect
A serious conversion error many online brands make is to post one weekly update and expect it to be a smashing hit. The timeline of the average Facebook and Twitter user is packed with new updates every minute that swallows up your post. To boost conversion, your post must uniquely tap into the mere exposure effect.
This is a psychological term where humans like something the more they’re exposed to it. The same applies to social media marketing. To get people to like your content, post it repeatedly. Buzzsumo found in a research that reshared content boosts engagement by 686%. Share key content to increase engagement and conversion.
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Use Snapchat and GeoFilters
Over 100 million users watch 10 billion snaps a day, making Snapchat a huge market for any brand. Geofilters allow brands to add their logo or brand design to their posts. With Snap Stories, you can use photos and videos to promote your company’s culture and new product launches. To promote their brand, Pixar used Snap Story to share short interviews with intern animators at the company and show followers what the Pixar campus in Emeryville looks like.
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Use Life Events to get specific with your Facebook audience
A useful feature of Facebook’s Ad Manager is the ability to create an audience based on Life Events. It’s a tool that people use to share an important change in their life to their timeline. Facebook can target such people with your Ads. For example, if you sell jewellery, when someone posts a Life Event saying “Engaged”, Facebook will display your ads directly to that person’s newsfeed.
You can use other life events like relationship status, estimated income, new job status and others to target potential new leads. This helps to narrow your audience to those most likely to buy from your brand.
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Online Contests are Great for On-site Engagement
People love freebies and contests drive traffic to your social pages and website. Hubspot increased user engagement by organizing a contest where followers could pitch a business idea in 25 words or less for a chance to win cash prize, mentorship and 3 years of Hubspot. Over 42,000 people like the post and it had about 4,500 shares on Facebook alone.
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Social Media can Grow your Email List
We’ve indicated that email has the highest conversion rate, more than search and social media combined. It is so powerful that it drove 25.1% of Black Friday sales in 2015. You can harness the traffic power of social media with the conversion abilities of email to drive maximum results and increase subscriber base.
If you don’t have an email list, Hosting Facts provides a few options to help you get started. Once you build a list, consistency is important. Cultivate a relationship of trust with your email subscribers and watch your conversion rates skyrocket.
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Use Images to Boost Shares
Each social media network handles text and images differently. Hence, you should be knowledgeable on their strengths to optimize your post on each network. Twitter has a maximum character count of 280. What they lack in words, they complement with images. Tweets with images witnessed 150% more retweets than those without images. The same applies to LinkedIn with 98% more comments and Facebook with 53% more likes.
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Links Should Lead to Relevant Landing Pages
The landing page your visitor lands on when entering your site should be relevant to the social media link and deliver what it promised. Avoid detours and unpleasant surprises, your followers clicked the link for a reason so ensure that the link and surrounding content leads to where the user expects.
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Use Special Targeting Options for Social Media Advertising
4Apart from Facebook’s Life events, there are other social media Ad tools to help to optimize your digital efforts. Many social media sites have options for retargeting. Use information from social media content that people visit the most to send targeted Ads to them.
Sending direct Ads is a waste of money and doesn’t assure return on investment. Retargeting allows you to touch warm prospectsmore likely to be receptive to your content and what you’re offering. Familiarize yourself with different tools for various social media platforms until you find one that works well for your digital efforts.