6 ways to turn social media fans into customers

Here are six tips for upping your social media sales conversion success.

1. Create a strategy

Start off on the right foot by creating a social media strategy. All those Facebook posts and tweets may not help your sales much without proper planning.

First, determine the goals of your social media presence, whether it’s attracting more customers, boosting brand recognition or improving customer service. Decide who your target audience is, and spell out a content strategy covering:

• your key messages
• kinds of content that will appeal to your audience
• a list of keywords that describe your business. You’ll use these words in your content to help you rank higher in Internet searches for those terms. You can use Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find popular keywords relevant to your business.

Second, create an action plan that sets out employee responsibilities for social media tasks and a publishing schedule for posts.

2. Optimize your website

The greatest social media page in the world won’t do you much good if it’s driving fans to an awful website—one that’s hard to navigate and plagued by jargon-laden text.

A clean, attractive website with compelling visuals is all-important for converting social media fans into paying customers. Visitors shouldn’t need to do a lot of clicking or scrolling to find what they want. Pages on your site should also prominently feature your contact information and clear calls to action—a box or image that asks visitors to take the action you seek (e.g. buy your products, contact a sales rep or sign up for a newsletter).

3. Create unique landing pages

Improve your conversion odds by creating unique landing pages for each of your social media pages. This is a special webpage designed specifically for visitors arriving from a social media page. Make sure you have consistent messages and a clear call to action on the landing page.

4. Use social selling

Social selling is the process of building a network on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook to make connections and present yourself as an expert in your field.

To get started, research companies you are interested in doing business with and take a close look at who you’d want to connect with. Then, connect and start building a relationship with those people by sharing content, inviting them to events or introducing them to potential customers.

But don’t expect this technique to make big wins quickly. Social selling is all about fostering relationships over the long term.

5. Explore social media’s conversion features

Social media platforms now allow businesses directly promote their products and services with paid ads.

Facebook, for instance, allows you to create special deals that can be redeemed on your website or in-store. You can also create ads that show your catalogue to a target audience, or even promote store visits to people close to your location. Instagram has similar features that can be used to target consumers directly.

Meanwhile, Pinterest allows businesses to use five types of “rich pins” that display additional information about your posts.

Product pins, for example allow you to show where and at what price the pictured product can be purchased. Because many people on Pinterest use the site as an online wish list, product pins can be a great way to boost online sales.

If you do business in the United States, you could even choose to create a buyable pin, which allows users to purchase a product directly on Pinterest.

6. Measure, learn and optimize

As in any conversation, listening is half the job. Be sure you’re monitoring what fans are saying and doing. Look at what kinds of content sparks the most reaction and leads to the best conversion rates. And monitor other successful companies in your industry to see what they’re doing on social media.

Then, optimize what your activities to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.