14 Tips To Boost Your Profits Through Social Media

Today we will explore social media as part of a whole marketing process and discover tips that can guarantee a profitable boost to your profits.

Your potential customers are online daily through all the social platforms, making it a great opportunity to increase brand awareness and build authentic relationships online. Indeed, you need engagement to build your loyal following, expose your message through social sharing, and get people’s reactions. Your fans can be your loyal advocates...

More than 50% of users recommend products in their tweets, so are your products being recommended ? What is the image your customers are conveying in regards to your brand on the social networks?

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to increase your revenue through Social Media:

1. Understand what you want to achieve from your Social Media Strategy. Define your target and marketing plan by defining the objectives you wish to achieve for your business using social networks. Do you want to build awareness to your brand, get more visibility, more traffic or reach more clients? Without clear goals, you won’t achieve your full ROI. 
    
2. Always consider your brand’s positioning and tone of voice in your action plan. If you didn’t find your tone of voice yet, here are some of the questions you should ask yourself : 
• Imagine your brand was a person. Now, what kind of personality would it have? And what would be their relationship to the consumer? (a coach, friend, teacher, dad, etc). Which adjectives your company’s personality is and is not? List them down.
• Which companies have a personality that is similar to yours? Why are they similar?
• Which image would you like to convey to your customers about your company?
   
3. Invest in the right Social tools. You do not need to be present on all the Social Media Networks, instead choose wisely the ones that have the right demographics for your target audience, ie: who do you want to reach and why?
• Facebook users count as 71% of online adults.
• Twitter users count as 23% of online adults, knowing that most users are younger adults. 
• Instagram users count as 26% of online adults. Most users age between 18 and 29.
• Pinterest users count as 28%, with mostly women and those in the highest income bracket.
• LinkedIn users count as 28%. The platform is a professional networking platform, hence it is mostly used by college graduates, those in higher-income households and the employed.
   
4. Pick your posting strategy. How many posts should you post per day? How often should you post? When and what should you post? Make sure you maintain regular communication with your audience.
    
5. Increase your likes and follows. The more Likes and Followers you have the larger the audience for your marketing efforts. There are many ways to increase your fans base, including online advertisment. You can also create contests to get more fans. 
    
6. Keep them engaged: Engaging with your audience is crucial. Offer value to keep your customers engaged (discount, … ). Your fans will appreciate the value of the offer and that will increase their Facebook engagement with your page. Share content that is of interest to your users such as recipes, whitepapers, ...You can also ask relevant questions that connect with your customers and fans that encourage them to share and participate in a conversation.
    
7. Visuals will help you get more engaged. Videos as well, as Facebook is becoming more and more a video platform.
    
8. Plan in advance. Set up a content calendar so that you're not wondering what to post every morning. Schedule your posts in advance when possible, and include images or videos.
    
9. Participate and share your content in group discussions on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+.
    
10. Be interactive, you can post quizzes or polls to engage followers., or even run a live Q&A or a competition. 
    
    
    "Good conversation will drive traffic" Kat Chow
11. On Twitter, you can see what’s trending. Tweet about that!
     
12. On Instagram, you can use 20 to 30 hashtags per post. This allows you to touch more followers, prospects, and fans by broadening the reach. On all media platforms, hashtags can help you find and converse with followers and potential customers. Example of a hashtag : #country. You can create 20-30 hashtags that you generally use in your posts, and they can be about your brand, product, service, location, ...
     
13. Don’t forget call to actions in every post ! This will cause your followers to engage 3 times more. A call to action is a statement or question that asks your followers to do something,such as answer your question, share or like a post, click to access a website, etc…
     
14. Measure and improve performance with insightful reports and Key Performance Indicators such as mentions, brand sentiments, your fans and followers growth, your number of likes and shares, your demographics, ...You want to be able to know what you gain from the investment you make in social media marketing.
     

 

Conclusion

To get sales from social media, one has to first create and nurture the online relationships on social networks. Adopt a fan-first approach and care as much about what your fans find valuable, as the experience they have with the brand. Once you've established connections with followers, you can start to drop in offers to turn social media activity into online and offline sales.

You can also personalize your offers exclusively to social media in a very targeted manner. Whatever you do, don’t forget to monitor your performance and adjust your strategy accordingly.