HOW TO MONETIZE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIENCE
Not only has social media revolutionized relationships, it’s also changed the whole marketing industry. Over the last five years, social media marketing has skyrocketed and is now considered one of the most important digital marketing tools for developing new and existing business.
The two-way communication platform enables individuals and businesses to interact with one another, allowing relationships to be built, trust to be developed and feedback to be acted upon instantly. Often so much time and effort is spent building up a following that businesses forget about the power social media has to develop new businesses. Frequently described as ‘the best sales channel’, global brands and small start-ups have successfully built up their social profiles, and as a consequence, increased their income tenfold.
But how exactly do you go about monetizing your social media presence?
1. OFFER DEALS
Deals are an excellent way to monetize your business’ social media and drive your audience into making sales. Posting exclusive and ‘limited’ discounts across social channels – particularly Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram – will ‘reward’ your audience, keep them communicating with you, boost social shares and even help to grow your audience further.
2. TRACK CONVERSIONS
Offering exclusive deals is all well and good, but tracking the success of them cannot be forgotten about. Limiting promotions only to a social audience will allow you to measure its success in a single channel, which will help to inform promotions going forward.
3. UNVEIL NEW FEATURES AND PRODUCTS
If you’ve got a new product out, social media is one of the best places to start letting people know about it. Giving your audience access to early releases, or even beta versions of software gives them a sense of importance, while providing you with a unique opportunity to get some real feedback on new products and features.
4. CREATE AFFILIATE ACCOUNTS
Helping businesses to generate sales, affiliate advertisers have become very common in recent years as any social user can become an ‘affiliate advertiser’. Relatively simple to implement, it includes providing advertising materials to individuals for it to be circulated onto social media networks in a bid to influence friends and followers to make a purchase. Users are then paid a commission based on how much business is generated from said advertising. iTunes and Amazon have successfully utilized affiliate marketing in order to generate new business, so there’s no reason you can’t too.
5. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING
One of the standout features of social media platforms are the advertising opportunities. Extremely simple to use, they make creating adverts quick and pain-free. Working particularly well when you are running a special offer or promotion, Facebook’s ‘boost’ feature allows you to reach a larger portion of your fans at the touch of a button. Facebook’s paid for adverts is one of its most loved features. Giving businesses the opportunity to promote their product or service to a whole new audience, they allow companies to target specific demographics in order to get the best return on investment.
6. MAKE USE OF VIDEOS
Last year Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is generating 8 billion video views per day. No longer just an important part of businesses’ online presence, video is fast taking over social media. Ideal for generating interactions from your audience, helping to increase page shares, and thus, build following, videos can be factual and entertaining, while helping to boost income. Jumping on the video bandwagon now can really help to establish your brand as leaders and innovators, allowing you to stand out from the crowd.
7. CONNECT WITH INDUSTRY INFLUENCERS
Word of mouth is the most powerful tool on social media. Identifying industry influencers and developing a relationship with them can really boost a business from the bottom up. Well-known bloggers and well-respected companies are the first place to start as they will usually have a loyal following themselves.
Jeff Bullas, Donna Moritz, Michael A Stelzner and Rebekah Radice are some of the social media influencers whom we follow closely at SMhack.
8. INCLUDE SOCIAL MEDIA IN YOUR CONTENT MARKETING PLAN
Content marketing is extremely important and cannot be underestimated. Helping to increase brand awareness and improve search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media go hand in hand. Using social media to promote your blog and website content can attract new followers who are really interested in you and what you do.
9. RETAIN CURRENT CUSTOMERS
When looking to monetize via social media, it’s all too easy to focus on potential customers. However, the brands that are the most successful are the ones who use social media as a customer service tool. Ensuring you keep your customers happy after a purchase is just as important as enticing new customers in. After all, if they’ve bitten once, it’ll be much easier to reel them in again.
10. CONCENTRATE ON QUALITY OVER QUANTITY
We understand how easy it is to focus on numbers rather than interactions when it comes to social media, however focusing on the quality over quantity cannot be emphasized enough. Identifying customers who are really interested in engaging with your brand is extremely valuable. These consumers can provide recommendations, feedback, and reviews, which all helps to underpin your brand’s quality and add value. Positive messages from real people carry much more clout with potential customers than thousands of ‘likes’.
What are the ways in which you have monetized your social media audience? What did you learn from them? Let us know in the comments section below, tweet to https://twitter.com/smhackapp or write on our Facebook wall https://www.facebook.com/smhackapp/
