How to Turn Social Media Marketing Into Conversions

As a business owner, you’re on Facebook, Twitter or maybe another social media (SM) site, but that doesn’t mean you’re maximizing the potential of those platforms. Are you simply providing some cost savings and entertainment to your smattering of followers, or are you converting your social media contacts on a regular basis? If you’re not converting customers, you’re wasting your time and efforts.

Each SM platform offers a different approach, reaches different demographics and has different best practices. It’s not something you can learn on the fly or necessarily translate from your own successful personal page. Social media platforms such as Twitter have very high revenues which stem from their millions of users, and you can maximize this for your own business by attracting users to engage with you on social media.

That’s why social media managers are in such high demand and why many businesses are handing over their campaigns to firms with skills. Are you simply glorifying and validating being on Facebook all day?

Social Media Analytics

What do your social media analytics say about your success rates? You should be running reports each week, and perhaps each day depending on activity levels. If budgets are tight, there are many free analysis tools which are still very comprehensive. To get started, try out one of the reports available from the social media site itself. They’re user friendly, easy to read and provide a goldmine of big data for usage.

It will tell you which posts are popular, which are being shared and which are being ignored. This lets you know what your readers want to see so you can go down the right path. Did the post about your half off sale drum up the most likes this week? Simultaneously, did you enjoy higher sales with this event compared to similar ones in the past? Those are hard conversions at work.

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From “friends” to customers

Never forget the actual purpose of SM for business: Engaging with customers to build relationships and increase sales and/or improve your reputation. It’s those “ands” that really matter because it’s nice to have a personal connection with customers, but not if your sales are stagnating. In order to turn your online SM efforts into improvements, you need to guide your followers towards making purchases without using SM as a sales pitch device.

Sounds like tough work, right? It’s all about content quality whether text, videos or photographs and underhandedly pushing target markets towards checking out your latest products or services without sounding like an ad campaign. Offer truly good deals only to SM followers, host contests with product giveaways, and start using your followers as your own marketing team.

Ideas to try

If you want to improve your sales, it’s not enough to paste a copy of the clearance sale on your SM site. You might offer a freebie to the first 20 people in the store, the chance to win a high-stakes item for anyone who spends over $100 in your online shop, or otherwise encourage consumption via a tasty piece of bait.

However, this will only work if you’re offering up something of real value. You’re vying for attention and dollars in a very competitive field no matter what your industry. Make it matter and your market will take you seriously.