There’s no denying the power of social media these days. Hello, people, it’s 2019 and if you have a business, you better believe it’s time to choose a social platform and CONNECT.
According to Business News Daily, approximately 70% of Americans are on social media—that’s a HUGE market to tap into. That said, at the end of the day, having a growing list of followers and subscribers means nothing if it’s not income producing.
It’s all about the conversion, baby. Here are four ways to use social media to better engage and (more importantly) convert your audience…
Choosing the Right Social Platform For Your Business
First thing’s first: getting on social media. Should you run out and sign up for every platform available?
Um, not so much.
Where you choose to spend your time, energy—and possibly money with ads—depends on your product, service and/ or audience. While almost every single business rushes to start a Facebook page (and for good reason), not every business will be best served—or best serve others—through platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter.
And please, no… just NO… to Snapchat.
Okay, so SOME brands are using Snapchat and doing it well. Point taken—but for the rest of us, can we PLEASE promise to keep our filter game strong with our personal accounts only?
So, how do you choose? You need to look at who your audience is specifically. What’s their demographic? Where do THEY hang out? And where are they going when they’re looking for what you are offering?
In a nutshell…
- Facebook: Connect, engage and build relationships with your audience.
- Instagram: Ideal for product-based or very visually appealing businesses (think photography, fashion and food). If you’re audience includes millennials, you should consider using Instagram.
- Twitter: Inform and build awareness, 280 characters at a time.
- LinkedIn: Most effectively used by professional demographics for networking, thought sharing and B2B lead generation.
- Pinterest: Often thought to just be for DIY hacks and recipes, Pinterest is now owned by Google and has become a powerful tool for many companies looking to utilize the platform to drive traffic to their websites.
Cater to Your Platform
Now that you’ve chosen your platform, it’s time to ensure you’re catering directly to them. Not all content is appropriate for each platform. Furthermore, if you think you’re going to wax nostalgic on Facebook only to copy and paste that bad boy into Twitter, think again because there simply isn’t the character space to do it.
Each platform has its own “fun” rules to follow… do you know them?
You may not think Facebook has a character limit… but actually, it does. 63,206 characters to be exact. While we highly doubt you’ll ever get close to that, other ones such as 280 for Twitter or 700 for company posts on LinkedIn are important to remember.
Need a cheat sheet?
Finally, when catering to the various platform, don’t forget about creating size appropriate photos for each. With different dimensions across the board, don’t use the same photo for all covers or posts and risk having valuable branding images, contact information or details cropped out.
Avoid Selling Directly On Social
Ultimately, social media pages are for being exactly that—SOCIAL. While it may seem hard to engage without selling, you want your pages to be a place for your audience to build trust in your brand. The last thing anyone wants is to be bombarded with posts from Spammy Pammy every time they log onto Facebook, IG or LinkedIn.
To do this, take the selling OFF of social media. Using email building, links and strong calls-to-action (CTAs) you can move your audience away from social platforms without ever losing the chance to convert them.
PS: When you’re committed to creating valuable content for your audience that offers solutions and benefits that they can take that VERY moment and execute for results, you’ll grow your brand and convert without breaking a sweat.
Encourage Engagement On Your Page
By now, we know you’re all about the #CTA. If you’re not, well, frankly that’s absolutely part of your conversion problem right there. Don’t pass go and don’t collect $200 until you brush up on the uber importance of a CTA.
While for social media you typically can’t control the copy for a button (we’ll dive into that another time *WINK WINK*), you can add CTAs to your social copy that encourages both action and engagement.
If your copy is strong enough to get them to act and convert, then GREAT!
Otherwise, the copy can help sway people to act on that very post. What’s the benefit of that?
SO glad you asked.
We all know that social media can be a finicky friend. Some days it seems like NO ONE sees your posts (you know… the ones that are SO good you’re practically refreshing your phone waiting for the notifications to roll in? Just us?) And then other days it’s a non-stop ding, ding, ding of likes, loves and shares.
Kind of reminds us of this meme:
INSERT MEME OF DAY GIRL GETS DOLLED UP AND SEES NO ONE/ DOESN’T GET DOLLED UP AND SEES EVERYONE.
You can blame this all on the lovely algorithms. Unfortunately one of the only downsides to social media marketing is that we don’t 100% control the flow of information to our audiences. As such, the algorithm gods that be can determine just how much visibility our posts get (within reason, of course.) So, now what?
Asking for engagement on your page doesn’t have to feel spammy. In fact, it can be a great tool that your audience will enjoy being a part of, just as much as you enjoy the results. Effective ways to do this include:
- Asking the reader to “tag a friend”. IE: The summer savings are coming to an end… tag a friend that can’t miss this 50% discount!
- Schedule an #AMA Day. Ask Me Anything posts typically drive TONS of questions… which in turn drive engagement. If you want to really connect with your audience, and you have an active community, do this on Facebook Live!
- Ask For User Generated Content (UGC). UGC posts are delightfully successful, especially when done on the right platforms, with the right audiences and tagged accordingly.
- Ask Your Audience to Share. Different from UGC, all this means is you ask a question and people respond—except make it PERSONAL. For better or for worse, people want to talk about themselves and when given the chance, they dive ALL IN. Ask them to share their anniversary, wedding, childbirth, or engagement stories. Ask them about their favorite vacation. Ask them… ANYTHING… people just want to give their 2 cents, and in this case, it actually helps you!
- Schedule a Poll. Same concept, same reason, same results as just mentioned. Odds are your audience LOVES having a voice.
All of the above work to increase the amount of people engaging with your account—and when those numbers begin to grow, so does the number of eyeballs landing on your posts. Social algorithms LOVE popular posts and do their part to build the momentum behind clearly successful content. Did someone say GOING VIRAL?!
At the end of the day, the thing that will help you convert your audience best is showing up consistently and authentically. If they already feel that they know, like and trust you, then getting them to take advantage of the services and/ or products you’re offering won’t be a problem for long. If you feel like you aren’t connecting with your target audience—or you’re simply not seeing the conversions you should be by now—reach out to us to find out how we can help.