Improve Conversion with Social Media Marketing
With internet access becoming as common as a TV set or a functioning toilet, the popularity of social media is not showing any signs of slowing down. Social media is much more than a platform for tech saavy young adults to share every bit of their lives with their friends – there’s a plethora of ways that a business can increase its conversions through it. The essence of it is to increase exposure and attract potential customers, and there are a number of strategies to accomplish that.
General
Interactive offers such as sweepstakes, coupons, and contests with prizes will almost always increase traffic. Although they may decrease your overall conversion rate, they will give you an increase in the total number of conversions and therefore revenue.
The Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Storefront are two good places to start getting exposure for your products. Not only can visitors shop, but they can also easily share attractive deals with their friends.
Creating fun landing pages can help you get a lot of “likes”. Every “like” can potentially lead to thousands of visitors on Facebook because every time someone likes something, all their friends can see what they like too.
Involvement is another key factor. You won’t get a lot of visitors if you’re the only one posting on the page. Getting conversations going and generating comments is a must to get your page found more. A good way to do that is to ask potential customers for feedback.
Facebook can be integrated into any website. If some or all features of your site require the visitors to create a user account, you can set the Facebook API to let them log in with their Facebook account. If not, there’s always room for a Facebook like button.
Twitter is all about interaction. Not just interaction with customers, but also with influential people in your industry. Using video games as an example, Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski, the design director at Epic Games has over 100 000 followers while following under 400 people. Getting the attention of someone like that will also get the attention of his or her followers. Bleszinski’s twitter feed is listed in over 3000 users’ Twitter lists – which is a huge bonus
Timing is also a big part of success on Twitter. Older tweets get buried very quickly, so it’s important to know when people from your chosen market go online. Teenagers, for example, are more likely to be on twitter after school hours, while anyone in the IT field is more likely to be online at work.
Integration of Twitter buttons on your website is an easy way to get more visitors from Twitter. A Tweet button will allow your visitors to share the page with their followers, while a Follow Us button will allow them to subscribe to all your future tweets
YouTube
YouTube is a great way to increase the amount of visitors and conversions if you can make some interesting and fun videos. Embedding relevant videos from YouTube and transcribing them is a great way to get traffic from search engines. Transcribing manually may be a little tedious for longer videos, but the boost in search engine traffic is more than worth it, since Google’s bots mainly check your text.
Let your visitors do the work
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are far from the only places where you can share your content. There is also Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and many more — too many to share everything manually. AddThis and ShareThis are great tools to let your visitors automatically submit your content to as many content sharing sites as possible, giving you that many potential sources of visitors and conversions.
Offline Support
A combination of all of the above will work even better with some offline promotion, such as a Twitter or Facebook URL on a business card or receipt.
Not only is social media a very viable tool to expose your product through channels best suited to your target market, but it is also a great way to connect with your customers and learn how to better satisfy them. Both will lead to increased conversions and revenue for your business.
Eric Wyatt writes on internet marketing and social media. He particularly focuses on conversion optimization and landing page optimization.
