How to Convert Social Media Followers Into Customers

You’ve been pouring effort into growing your social media handles and finally you got a good follower base. Have you considered turning these followers into paying customers?  At the end of the day no matter how many followers you gain, the important goal remains to make a return on investment. In this article, we’ll look at some ways you can capitalize on your social efforts by converting your Social Media followers into paying customers.

Know Your Audience

Are you attracting the right audience? This is a very important question to ask for your business. The difference between followers and customers is that a follower can be anyone who follows you for the content you post. For example, if you have a pet supply store and post photos of cute dogs, then people who do not own a dog may follow your account just to see these pictures. So, how does that affect you? Well, these followers may not buy your products for the simple fact that they do not own a pet. This means you cannot convert that follower into your customer. So, what you ideally want is to gain followers who are also your target customers. 

The first step to getting more customers from your social media marketing is to clearly identify your target market. You must research and develop customer personas to guide an effective communication strategy with your prospective buyers. Once you know your target market you can find out what their interests are and what they would respond to, you can then change your social media strategy to reflect your findings by creating posts that these audiences would enjoy and are looking for. This will ensure the majority of your followers are part of your target audience, which gives you a higher chance of converting them into customers.

Choosing Social Media platforms 

At this point with a good social media following you may have already decided which social media platforms to be on, but it’s important to make sure you are on the right ones if you want to effectively convert those followers into customers. 

These days with the amount of traffic the top social media platforms get, it’s a good idea to be active on as many big social media platforms as possible. However, it’s important to recognize that your target audience will dictate how much emphasis you need to put on each one. Here’s a look at the monthly active users across the most popular social networks.

Let’s say you’ve identified that your target market is somewhere in the 18 to 29 year-old group. Since 86% of that audience is already on Facebook & Instagram, then you should definitely place a heavy emphasis on these channels.

If your business is strictly marketing to people over the age of 60, it would be ineffective to focus your marketing efforts on Snapchat, instead, you should focus on Twitter or even LinkedIn.

Some businesses may have a wider range of products and services, which translates into a more diverse target market. In this case, you’ll need to use each platform differently, according to the users you’re trying to reach.

Make sure your messages make sense for the social media channel you’re using.

You should customize your outreach to meet the needs of your ideal buyer personas on each social media platform. This will increase the chances of gaining more followers and turning them into customers over time.

Create a Social Media Strategy

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Once you have defined who your customers are and you understand their interests and behaviour online, the next thing to consider is your business goals. When you say you want to convert your social media followers into customers, what do you mean? What is the specific action that you want your customers to take? This action may differ from business to business based on the product/service or business model they operate on. For example, an educational institution may want to collect leads, which is the contact information of prospective customers. An online publisher or blog may want to increase their subscription. A clothing store’s goal may be to drive traffic to their website where the customers can buy their product.

It’s important to define your business goals and what KPIs best suit your goals. With all the information you have collected so far you can then come up with a social media strategy that defines what kind of content you will post on which platform and how this content will drive the customer to fulfill your business goals. You may also want to consider the consistency of your social media effort by planning a social media calendar which tells you how many posts you are planning per week. Once your strategy is defined then it’s just a matter of following it consistently to reach your goals. 

Stay Active and Engage with Consistency

Gaining new followers is great, but this won’t accomplish anything unless your customers remain as engaged as possible. The best way to do this is by staying active on all your platforms with consistency.

Updating your social media pages once a week isn’t going to cut it if you want to turn your followers into customers. Daily activity will create a more authentic experience with your followers. It’s best to have a proper strategy and consider creative ways to use different formats on a platform effectively. For example, instead of only focusing on posting pictures you can also consider videos, reels, stories, and other options available on various social media platforms to effectively engage with your audience. Social media is all about expressing yourself and when someone else acknowledges you for it on social media, it creates a feeling of acceptance or social validation. This is what drives people to value comments, mentions, replies, likes, shares, views, and followers. So if you engage with your customers online it makes them happy.    

Also, it’s not always about posting more, make sure you reply to all comments and messages as fast as possible. If you do, your followers will be more likely to convert.

Build Trust by Leveraging User-Generated Content

Like mentioned before, nothing makes a customer feel more important than being acknowledged, possibly even honored by their favourite brand, and 25% of survey respondents claimed that they bought a product after seeing it in posts of other users.

Asking your most loyal customers to share their experiences with your brand will help turn more followers into new customers. That’s because 76% of consumers find user-generated content more honest than other forms of advertisements.

Hands down, encouraging your users to talk about you and your product or service is a surefire way to improve customer acquisition. UGC is the reason some brands are valued highly among customers. 

One thing to consider is that UGC could also be harmful to your company. If enough people are not satisfied with your product or service, they may create content around their experience and share that online. This may create a snowball effect and destroy your brand. For this reason, it’s in your best interest to provide the best service or product possible before encouraging UGC and it’s also wise to have a reputation management team in place to control any damage. 

Invest in Paid Ads on Social Media

Investing in ads on social media is a great way to build a large hyper-targeted following. Almost all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. offer paid ads. You can use these to increase your reach, content views, clicks, and engagements.

You can make the most of your investments with offers and repurposing previous posts to reach more targeted potential consumers. This way you can get new followers, subscribers, and potential leads for the future.

The best part is the ability to get really specific with your demographic targeting at scale. You can tailor different ads to different personas with incredible precision, increasing the likelihood of acquiring more of your business’ target customers.

Provide Customer Service on Social Media

Outstanding customer service is often the deciding factor that sways consumers towards buying from one business over another. After all, your efforts are on public display.

90% of consumers use social media to talk to businesses directly and it also happens to be their preferred method for customer care. Quick replies and resolving your customers’ queries can help increase trust and boost your reputation significantly.

Providing great customer support on social media is a great way to increase business through word-of-mouth marketing. You can create either good or bad press for yourself, both of which can seriously impact your customer acquisition on social media.

Website Optimization

The best convincing social media strategy, calendar, or ad will not help if you are driving traffic to an unoptimized hard-to-use website. This generally means customers have a hard time navigating your website and they end up giving up before converting. Don’t let your social media efforts go in vain because of a badly optimized website. So, what does optimization mean and what should you do?

The first thing to consider is website navigation. You have to make it very easy for customers to find what they are looking for. A simple way to do that is by focusing on your content architecture, and making clear on-page navigation options in the header and footer in the form of menus. The next thing to take into account is the individual pages and the quality of the content available on them. Make sure to include everything your customer may want to know about related to the product or service. Once this is done make sure your website is SEO optimized and has a fast loading time. 

Landing Pages

When creating content for social media calendars or ads, our ultimate goal is to convince the customer to click the link. To do so, we need to write good copy promising the customer a solution to a specific problem your product or service will solve, providing them a reason as to why they should check out your website. 

This means when a customer goes through your post and opens your link the chances are that they are very interested in the promise that you have made them. So, if they find very little information about the problem on the webpage you sent them to, or if the product or service page talks about a lot of other features or benefits that the customer is not looking for, then the customer may turn his back and walk off because the page is not addressing what he is specifically looking for. 

This is where the landing page comes in. With the help of landing pages, you can hyperfocus on the specific solution your customer is looking for and can explain in detail how you will solve his problem. This increases your conversions by personalizing the experience the customer gets. So, instead of linking to your service pages, it’s best to create custom landing pages unique to the solution you have promised in the social media post or ad. 

Social Media Analytics

How do you know if your social media efforts are paying off? You do that by measuring your success. This is where social media analytics come to play. To implement social media analytics you need to have a clear idea about what your business or conversion goals are, and then find the appropriate KPIs that will help your measure your success. Once you know what you are looking for you can then use any social media analytics tool to set up measurements and check your success. Analytics will help you understand where are concerning your goals helping you develop insights on what needs to change to drive you to achieve the set goals. It's the cycle of setting goals, measuring, and optimizing that will help you realize your conversion goals. 

Conclusion

Having lots of likes and followers is great, but you need to find ways to convert these followers into customers to grow your business:

• Start with research on your target audience so you can appropriately market on each channel effectively.
• Stay active and engage with consistency. Make sure you’re always responding to your followers’ comments and questions to keep them engaged.
• Leverage user-generated content to boost trust with your followers.
• Provide amazing customer service and showcase that on social media.
• Invest in paid ads to reach more potential hyper-targeted consumers at scale.

If you follow these tips, you’ll have more than just lots of followers, you’ll end up with more customers and more revenue to grow your business. To learn more about how to convert your social media followers into customers, call TechWyse today at 866.288.3095 or contact us on our website.