Social media has evolved from fun add-on in your marketing strategy to a fully viable source of revenue. It’s no longer nice to have a good social media presence –– it’s necessary.
Social media technology evolves quickly, and best practices can change month to month. But for right now, here are some tips on how you can leverage social media not only to build your audience, but to convert them into paying customers.
Know Where Your Customers Are, and Post There
Knowing where your customers are is a huge key in determining your social strategy. It’d be a waste of time to craft great content, only to put it in front of the wrong people.
A great place to start is Pew Research’s Demographics of Social Media Users. This is annual report of which people are using which social media platforms year after year, and it serves as a great launching point for where you’ll want to focus your social media efforts.
Lets say you have an online men’s clothing brand, selling predominantly to 20–30 year olds. Looking at the demographics above, Pinterest might not be your best bet for posting, as only 17% of online adult men are active there.
However, over on Instagram, nearly 26% of online men are active users, along with almost 60% of people ages 18–29, meaning you’ll be reaching way more of the right audience.
Post Regularly, But Not Too Regularly
Once you’ve figured out where you should be posting, the next thing to think about is content strategy. You want to make sure you’re posting social media content that is engaging, represents your brand well, and makes people want to follow you. Per Sprout Social, 53% of Instagram users follow brands. You want to make sure you’re one of the brands that gets followed.
One of the biggest things to keep in mind here is post frequency. Yes, people follow you because they want to keep up with your brand, but if you over do it, they’ll be just as happy to cut you out.
Citing the image above, 46% of social media users said that too many messages would make them unfollow a brand, with another 34.9% saying too many tweets will get brands the unfollow.
People like seeing your content, but they also like seeing their friends’ content. If you’re taking up all of their social feed and making it difficult to find other people’s posts, you’ll get cut.
That being said, don’t fall onto the other side of this spectrum, because there’s a chance you’ll get unfollowed for being too quiet as well. According to revive.social, here are the optimal amount of times to post per day, per platform:
Facebook: 1 post per day
Instagram: 1.5 posts per day
Twitter: 3–5 posts per day
Pinterest: 3 posts per day
Keep in mind that these are merely suggestions, and they can change depending on your business, market, etc. So make sure you’re constantly looking at metrics to get a feel for what frequency works well for your brand.
Make Purchasing Easy
If you’re promoting your products on social media, you want to make the journey from seeing the product to purchasing it as easy as possible.
If you post about a product, be sure to include a link to purchase. You don’t want to lost any sales because it took too many steps to get to the product.
To optimize the purchasing experience even more, make sure your website is set up on a platform that lets you sell directly on social media platforms. Platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce make purchasing directly on platforms like Facebook and Instagram a breeze.
For more tips on finding the right eCommerce platform to set up your website on, check out: The 5 Best eCommerce Platforms for Launching Your Online Store in 2018
Use Customer Reviews to Build Trust
One of the biggest goals for your social media strategy, and really your marketing strategy as a whole, should be to build trust. People aren’t going to buy from you if they’re not confident in who you are as a company. One of the best ways to do that is through customer reviews and testimonials.
Companies like Yotpo make it easy to capitalize on customer reviews, and turn them into content that converts website visitors into buyers. User Generated Content (UGC) can have major implications on your sales:
The graph above from Yotpo shows the conversion rates (CVR) of website users who came across UGC on a website versus those who did not. That’s nearly three times as many conversions!
UGC can take place in the form of product reviews, or even customer photos of your product. Seeing other people with your product and what they have to say about it gives you a major boost in authority, and builds trust between you and your audience.
Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Friendly
Per comScore, 80% of social media time is spent on mobile. And if trends continue, that number will only go up.
If you’re using social media to get people to your website and buy your product, you want to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. If your mobile experience is hard to use, you’ll lose a lot of the customers you worked hard to attract through clever social marketing.
Luckily, most eCommerce platforms will make sure your website is optimized for mobile as well as desktop. But always make sure to browse your website on mobile every time you make an update to ensure that the experience is still smooth.
Track Sales With UTMs
A huge part of the marketing process is trying different things and seeing what works. One simple, effective way to do that is through UTMs. A UTM (Urchin Tracking Module), is a bit of code added to the end of your URL that allows you to track where your web traffic is coming from.
Tools like Terminus and Bitly allow you to create your own custom UTMs that identify where the majority of your traffic is coming from. This will give you a good idea of what you’re doing that is the most effective, and allow you to pour more resources towards it.
Our preferred UTM builder is utm.io, which offers a really great intro to UTMs, and is definitely worth checking out.
Social media moves fast, and the only way to figure out best practices and what works for you is to get started! Hopefully these tips help get your social media marketing strategy off the ground.
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