You have a Home Based Business and need to tap into a sea of customers for your business, and social media seems like a great way to go….
91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media channels
Key takeaways from this post
- Having multiple social media accounts doesn’t guarantee customers
- Social media traffic is a very different beast, but not impossible to handle
- How to make a solid social strategy
Many social media accounts doesn’t guarantee many customers
When social media first evolved, following the era of static websites, many businesses and entrepreneurs jumped on the bandwagon and started setting up accounts all over the place. There was a wave of a brand new “social media is a great way to find prospects” mindset. The attitude was almost as if you were guaranteed to go viral and see hundreds or thousands of customers just because you had a Facebook page.
Obviously, this idea of finding infinite customers didn’t take off, because without engaging content, a social media follower is just a number. There was no real strategy behind the idealized transition from “Facebook like” to “sale”. The truth is that social media hasn’t changed WHY people buy, it’s just added to the number of ways for HOW they buy.
Social media does allow us to find more potential customers and have people discover us. It’s a great place to post news and content out and allow people to see what we have to offer, learn about our convictions and come to know our personality.
As we move more and more mobile, quicker posts with less content are becoming more popular. Kind of like sending a text to a friend, rather than having a long conversation with them. This isn’t necessarily about getting CUSTOMERS, but getting people to notice us and follow what we have to say.
Once you start thinking about getting the most engagement out of a post, you’re bombarded with new factors that might take you out of the moment: scheduling times, daily posting ratios and curated content. It can make social media seem like a bit of a minefield.
Here’s the undeniable truth: Treat social media as a method to find interested people and get traffic to your website. Then, convert them to customers on the site. This is usually done by asking them to opt-in to a newsletter, following up with them, and getting them to spend any small amount on a product or service from you. Once these people have been converted to paying customers, ask them to join another social area to manage what they see, and change what you send them.
“Get involved in discussions where the right folks are talking about the right topics.”
You’re not connecting to the right audience.
Not Listening To Your Customer or Lead
Think of social media and customers like email lists and customers. If you attract a list of email subscribers, that doesn’t mean that they’re ready to be customers.
Some might become customers, and some might only be slightly interested. Others may never buy at all.
Rather than trying to find customers, find a group of people willing to listen to your voice and what you have to say. Match the right platform to your audience and make sure you’re going after the right people.
The number of worldwide social media users is expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2018.
You’re not delivering the right content
If you’ve found your audience and your platform, you need to make sure you’re posting the right content. This just means understanding what your audience wants help with or wants to see and showing them that content.
For example, if your customers are thirty year old males, then are they more likely going to be interested in NFL football scores or cooking videos?
Make sure that you’ve got a content plan that has 3 – 5 general topics and ideas that your audience really wants to read about. We know from experience that keeping things simple and posting the same great, useful article is way more effective than just posting anything for the sake of it.
Some people just don’t trust you (It’s nothing personal)
Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t want plastered on a billboard with your face on it.
People Just Don’t Trust You
So once you’ve started to generate traffic to your website, what happens if no one is buying? The short answer is probably that they don’t trust you. This can be due to a number of things.
For example, here at WPMakeovers we absolutely LOVE WordPress.
If they develop a new product, update, or service, we’ll probably support it based on trust alone. It doesn’t really need to be sold to us.
Trust can’t be bought or sped up. It’s earned through consistency, communication, and time. Understand what people want and over-deliver on their expectations.
If you’re finding that you can drive traffic to your site from social media, you need to ensure that visitors trust you enough to buy from you. The first step towards trust is capturing their email address and starting with email marketing.
So how do we convert social media followers to customers?
USE A PRIVATE GROUP
No one expects this as an answer, but we recommend setting up a private group on Facebook for your customers or leads. Make it somewhere they can ask questions and share content.
Keep it private and work on the community there. Traffic from closed groups that know you are an expert means that you’re not having to find new audiences every time you’ve got content.
You could use the group for support, customer services or accountability. Or all three. Post useful content that your customers want to consume and that’s a great method to check that other people will want it too.
MIX UP YOUR POSTING
With our pages and Twitter account, we recommend a 2:2:2 posting ratio. This just means that we don’t just post our own stuff out every day every of the week. We’ll find other useful content and older posts of ours too and make sure they all get an equal share.
This is way more powerful for driving traffic and from people that aren’t leads or customers yet. Try the below ratio for your business.
- 2 curated posts – these are posts and found content from other sources that suit your audience.
- 2 older posts – older content that’s yours but still useful.
- 2 current posts – new stuff that’s yours.
When do you post? Well that’s up to you really. The ratio is a guideline that means if you’re posting 6 posts a day, 2 should be older content, 2 should be curated, and so on. If you’re only posting once a day, then it roughly works our to 2 new posts over 2 days and 2 curated posts the next two days etc.
Don’t over-post, as it tends to look spammy. A good way to mitigate the look of spam is to post older and curated stuff.
FOLLOW THE RULES
These are the golden rules for posting on social media. They’ll help drive traffic and lower your workload.
- ALWAYS post with a link
- Mix up your titles
- Measure your clicks – use UTM links
- Don’t go nuts with #hashtags
- Schedule your posts
Summary
In summary, we really love the 2:2:2 ratio. It means we can fill out a CSV sheet with loads of content and load it into our social tool. We have a strategy where every post is first sent to a customer private group, but then posted out on our other channels too.
Some businesses might not like the idea of a private group, saying it’s too much work. But if you’re not willing to own the support and customer service side of your business, then you might not deserve more sales!
Many thanks to Rick Robbins from WordPress Makeovers for this article. If you need a Website or Blog, WordPress Makeovers is the only place to go.
PS: If you’re serious about driving more traffic to your website from social media and discovering more customers, then you need our:
Social Media Recruiter.
