The Art Of Winning Social Media Conversions?

Advertisers frequently reference the magic of social media as a way to boost conversions and engagement in consumers..

And, in fact, social media has evolved into the go-to solution for helping users locate niche products and be persuaded to take the plunge (convert).

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Some of the biggest platforms -- X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, -- are associated with some of the biggest and most consistent of these conversions.

One big reason for social media's success in this regard is its similarity, in today's digital age, to the marketing and sales procedures that ruled the traditional pre-internet era: In those years, the best salespeople commonly focused on building a relationship and trust with customers first before they began dropping hints about their product in the context of an "advisory" role.

In short, these salespeople didn't suddenly jump from making a contact to selling the product outright. So, the argument could be made that social media continues this tradition. It too builds a relationship and trust in an audience or clientele as a way to prime them for conversion.

Studies support this notion: According to Instagram's own reports, 80 percent of people who use the platform already follow a business. Also, those that already follow a brand or business are more inclined to be engaged with, and increase awareness about, that business. What's going on here is people's trust in "social proof": It's something customers look for in order to make decisions.

How can your business make use of this psychology? Here are some of the easiest ways to capitalize on it and get more conversions via social media:

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1. Create unique content for each specific platform you target.

Much the way applicants submit supplementary essays when applying to multiple colleges, you should create content for, and gear it to, the specific audience expectations of the media platform you're targeting. Writing content that is native to a platform greatly increases the chances that its audience will accept it.

2. Use more than just links to promote your content.

When you post on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, you cannot rely only on a stream of links to boost your conversion rates. As noted before, hard-selling customers quickly turns them off to a business. To avoid giving your audience this negative impression on social media, you should promote your business by providing meaningful, interesting content users think is fun and genuine.

3. Keep track of your traffic.

As a basic rule of thumb, know which links and outlets are attracting the greatest amounts of traffic to your business's commercial pages. There are a ton of resources that can help you simplify this monitoring process, like Google's URL builder, which helps you capture important data about a specific link in the name of the link itself.

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4. Know whom to target.

There are a number of ways to do this. Keep in mind that these methods should be designed to fit one platform, to produce the best results. Look at the sample platform, Instagram. In order to track the prime influencers in your niche, you might use a service like Ninja Outreach. Ninja Outreach specializes in finding influencers based on data associating certain keywords and their relevance and popularity on the platform of certain influencers.

5. Leverage existing professional relationships with marketers and influencers.

If you have a good working relationship with a number of marketers and influencers already, you can easily ask them to throw you a bone every now and then through a Twitter post or Facebook tag. First, think of relatively inexpensive things that marketers and influencers can do. Then, just reach out and ask them to mention your business in a tweet or tag back to your business in a relevant Facebook post.

While that may appear like a small gesture, it actually makes a huge difference in helping promote lead generations for your business.

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6. Provide an easy, discreet log-in system.

So, users have begun clicking on your promotional link: Now, what? If you're thinking ahead a few steps, you should realize that making them feel welcome and providing a convenient medium for them to purchase through is key to increasing conversions. The easiest way to do this is to set up a social login system which lets users sign-up with a Facebook or Google+ account. Make it a point to not slam the login request in the face of a user with an involuntary pop-up or fade, as this may drive away inquisitive users with low commitment.

7. Make your checkout process simple.

If you make a checkout process too complex or long, you may find that users who'd intended to buy a product will change their mind halfway through. You want to keep their enthusiasm and interest for your product going strong as they fill in credit card details or a PayPal address. Having a payment system in place that can process a number of different mediums while being clean and efficient will greatly expedite the payment process. The less time that users spend in the waiting line, the less time they'll have to reconsider or second-guess a purchasing choice.

What can your site do to help you improve the conversion rates for your business?

Guest Authored By AJ Agrawal. AJ He is CEO and Co-Founder of Alumnify, an alumni-engagement platform. He's a Growth Marketer, Entrepreneur and Content Creator for Entrepreneur, Forbes, FastCompany and Fortune Magazine. Follow AJ on Twitter.

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There are two main actions to consider when you're trying to get more conversions through social media:

The first is tracking social analytics; and the second is ensuring that your website and landing pages have strong calls-to-action and smooth account systems in place to attract and retain new customers..

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Maximize YOUR Social Media Conversions?

Eight tips to maximize social media conversions..

According to Statista, there were roughly 2.7 billion social media users all around the world in 2017 and in each succeeding year this figure is expected to rise for about 7%. That's why every social media marketer should consider their growing audience as an excellent opportunity for their marketing campaigns.

However, amidst the sea of opportunities, social media can be complicated and nothing is ever static. Things quickly come and go and interests can shift from one object to the next.

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Why Is A Social Media Strategy Important?

Developing a social media strategy is like creating a roadmap that guides you in all your planning and activities in various social media platforms. It lets you stay on track with your original intentions.

According to a Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index survey, approximately 56% of business owners don't have a social media strategy. But marketers who set goals and milestones are 466% more likely to experience success.

Three essential traits define the most successful brands on social media:

--They know their audience well.

--They know how to thrive on competition.

--The reach prospects in various social media platforms.

Moving forward, we've come up with different strategies to grow in your niche and increase your conversion rate through social media marketing.

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Schedule Your Social Interaction Right

One of the most significant benefits of social media is that you can have many followers from all over the world.

But with that, it's not always easy. Trying to interact with people is a challenge especially if you live in different time zones.

That's why you need to schedule your interactions with your social media followers during peak times of the day ‒ these are usually the hours that most of your audience is online.

So be consistent. Regularly interact with your audience whether through automated tools or in person. Over time, this can help build your brand loyalty and boost your conversions.

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Create Attractive Yet Informative Content

Ideally, you need to create and develop a type of social media content that is useful to your audience, something that offers a solution and is considered valuable to them.

While trends and all sorts of gimmicks may generate a certain degree of buzz and curiosity for some time, it isn't sustainable.

The bottom line is that people will always want solutions.</p><p>They want to experience relief from their particular pain points; they want answers from a particularly complicated question that helps them achieve a goal or overcome a hurdle.

Your post doesn't have to be long and drawn out to be considered informative, either. Short and sweet is the key.

But some businesses tend to struggle with this because they struggle to find their expertise in a particular field. That's why it's crucial to become an expert and know what you are talking about. That way, it's easier for you to find legitimate solutions in your niche.

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Reshare Your Content

If you come up with a material that's worth sharing, then schedule it for future shares.

To ensure maximum efficiency, the type of content that you need to share should be compelling and unique to your audience. For example, if you come up with a product video that's worth sharing again in the future then why not consider taking on a different question, snippet, or quote from the same material?

Again, the type of content that you create all points to the same source. You're just reshaping the material that's already existing and turning it into something unique.

Whenever you're sharing a piece of content for the second or third time, try to tweak your message. Ask your readers a question or get a quote from the post. That way, you don't come off as if you're spamming.

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Optimize Your Posts For Each Social Channel

You have to be aware that each social media platform handles various texts and images quite differently.

Therefore, you need to know the various strengths and weaknesses of a particular social media network, so that you can learn from it by adding variety into your content.

For instance, Facebook posts that have pictures generate 53% more likes than the average post. Meanwhile, posts that have images in LinkedIn get 98% more comments.

There's no denying it ‒ people respond well to visuals. So try to produce almost every single piece of sharable content with high-quality images.

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Don't Forget Social Sharing

Social sharing is a vital aspect if you want to create a robust online community. It builds traffic on your site and helps you achieve your marketing performance goals.

Here are the additional benefits of social sharing:

--Builds your brand as an industry expert by providing users with useful content, resources, news, and ideas.

--Enhances your social visibility within the community, helping you get into the radar of prospects, users, and potential partners.

--Excellent, sharable content generates the best conversations.

--Makes it easier to find your target audience.

--Builds great customers relationships and loyalty.

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Use Social Media To Build Trust

If you want to attract a large following and boost your conversions, you need to build trust for your brand. The highest conversion killers are a lack of trust and credibility.

The good news is, social media can be a powerful trust device, assuring potential customers that it's okay to buy from you. Prospects perceive a brand that has a high social media engagement as a measure of integrity and authority.

Maintaining an active social media presence will always be a crowd puller that shows your followers interested in your brand, attracting new and old buyers alike.

Allow Social Logins

More and more businesses let people sign up in their social accounts, making accounts more manageable and paving future visits to a site.

Because social media channels is a demonstration of new social interaction, you need to facilitate this kind of communication in many ways as possible.

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Utilize Data Analytics

Maintaining an active social media presence isn't enough as it won't generate ROI for you. If you want to improve your conversions on social media, you have to know first what's working and what is falling short in your expectations. That's why you need to track your performance for social media content, shares and likes using data analytics.

Utilizing tools like Google Analytics helps you monitor real-time results on your social media campaign. It removes the unnecessary guesswork from data analysis and gives you results that are real and relevant.

When you regularly analyze and monitor data, you'll know which posts are working from the ones that don't. You can make necessary changes, helping you find the right kind of audience, the right message to send out and the right time of the day to post. As a result, you're creating better conversions.

Guest Authored By Suzy Viola. Suzy is a social media marketing specialist and a photographer. She loves sharing her knowledge and interest to everyone that led her to become a freelance writer. The topics that she writes about are social media strategies and eCommerce marketing that helps a business grow. Follow Suzy on Twitter.

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"Maintaining an active and robust social media presence is a fantastic way to improve your conversions over time. Note, however, that getting the results you want does take time, so you need to be patient and develop a more systematic approach.

Aside from that, you need to continuously analyze your data and improve your social media efforts to stay on top of your game.." -SuzyViola

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Fixing YOUR Boring Social Media Brand?

So you’re putting all this time into social media, but what exactly are you getting back?

Well, it doesn’t seem to be driving conversions, really. You don’t seem to get much referral traffic either. So what the heck is the point? You spent at least two hours a week writing social content, why isn’t this whole thing paying off yet?

We get it. Your boss read an article about social media and all the cool brands are on it, so you now need to be on it too. You’re spouting some nonsense about your business, but you don’t seem to be getting hundreds of followers. All of your sales messages seem to be getting ignored, which is weird… Wasn’t social media supposed to drive thousands of sales for the business?

Well, guess what? Social media is not going to work for your B2B product, or your financial product – unless you’re investing heavily in paid ads. It just isn’t. Your brand is boring, so no one will pay attention to you. It’s as simple as that.

I know that this is hard for a lot of you to hear, but it’s time to face facts. Your brand is boring and people don’t want to engage with things that are boring.

Who among us wants to constantly be sold something? Who among us wants to constantly be pitched to, over and over and over? No one.

Related Article: The Art Of Winning Social Media Conversions?

So what’s the answer? Be creative..

Knowing what people like doesn’t require a marketing study and you don’t need to spend thousands of pounds building customer personas.

Take Innocent for example. I know they get dragged up time and time again as a great social brand, but there’s a reason for that. It’s because they are.

They don’t spend every waking moment telling us to buy smoothies, or reminding us of the health benefits of fruit. Innocent aren’t here to constantly sell, sell, sell. They understand the real power of social media is engaging with fans, which is exactly what they do.

Innocent are fun. They engage with their audience base in entertaining and creative ways and, shockingly to many people in the c-suite, they have quite a lot of autonomy.

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Innocent’s community managers are free to tweet things that are quite abstract, but they’re often the posts that do the best.

They don’t take every opportunity on social to plug their products because they know that doesn’t work.

Compare that with what you do. Wait, what do you do? You spend two hours a week writing product-led content, schedule it and leave it.

Set it and forget it. And you think this is going to drive engagement? You think your audience is going to be interested in a couple of generic, bland tweets and a boring Facebook post?

They’re not. None of us are. If you read back your social content and think ‘wow that’s boring’ then there’s a strong chance that everyone else will. If you, as an employee, aren’t even interested in what you have to say, then literally nobody else will care either.

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Instead, you should be thinking of ways you can add value to other people’s timelines. Humour is a good way to go. It’s worked for brands like Denny’s, Taco Bell and Netflix, but it can be difficult to master.

The other option is to be more informative. Helping people get the information they need is a great way to gain more traction for your brand. But don’t take this down the typical, boring route. Think about whether or not you’re actually helping your customers. If not, scrap it and start again. Getting messaging that works for both the brand and your customers can take time, but it’s worth it.

So mix it up. Be creative. Think about how you can position your brand to be more engaging with consumers. Then you’ll really start to see proper engagement and, who knows, maybe your brand will become a bit less boring.

Guest Authored By Billy Leonard. Billy is content and outreach executive at Harvest Digital, the oldest Digital Media Agency in the UK. Follow Billy on Twitter.

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“Mix it up!

Be Creative.

Think about how you can position your brand to be more engaging with consumers.

Then you’ll really start to see proper engagement and, who knows, maybe your brand will become a bit less boring.."

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)