Converting Social Media Followers into Blog Subscribers
The focus of a lot of internet marketing strategies has moved to social media in the past couple of years in response to the huge popularity of sites like Twitter and Facebook. The allure of these networks is the huge potential audience that they make available and the ease with which it is possible to pick up a large number of followers. While the dynamic nature of these sites undoubtedly makes them a great place to make new connections it is still necessary to move your Facebook friends to your own website to actually make a sale and so it is vital to have a strategy for converting social media followers into subscribers to your corporate blog or e-mail promotions.
When people like your Facebook brand page they are more likely to open to further interaction with you in the future. For this reason it is always productive to include a call to action in each of your social media posts. Asking for a comment or a ‘like’ can be a good way to build your social media profile but to make the conversion that will drive sales it is better to include a link to your website. Effective use of this conversion tactic requires a certain amount of tact and subtlety. Updating your status with a blatant sales pitch like “Buy my product here!” to accompany your link is too much like social media spam whereas introducing a topic of interest and posting a link to a more detailed discussion is likely to attract high levels of engagement as it offers real value to the user. The main thing to bear in mind is that social media is driven by conversations and the most engaging and effective ones won’t be a monologue so leave room for people to add their voice to encourage genuine engagement.
Sales leads that are generated by social media are different to customers that find you on Google or via your PPC marketing and they should be handled differently. The difference is that your Facebook friends already have a relationship with you and new customers that find you in the Google SERPs don’t so when your social media followers click through to your website it is important to recognize that they are already your friends. One practical way to handle this is to divert all of the social media traffic to your website to its own landing page and offering social network followers a special benefit for visiting can be directly connected to this page so that it forms an extra enticement to visit your website. It can also assume that these customers already have a general understanding of your business and can take a more familiar tone than the landing page for new visitors can and is an effective mechanism for transferring their friendship status from Facebook to your own website.
Collecting the personal information of visitors to your website should be one of the primary goals that you set for these social media converts and it is better to have them visit your squeeze page before they can go on to view the content that they were looking for. The opportunity to gather their information is a small window and asking for details up front can put some people off continuing but for those people that are really interested it will be a condition that they accept readily enough and even often expect when clicking through from a social site to a corporate website. It usually isn’t too difficult to get people to follow your links from social media sites as many people use social sites to find new and interesting content online. Making the most of those visitors is the way to convert your Facebook friends into paying customers.
