Tools For Leveraging Social Platforms Social

The Power Of Social Platforms

Social media has become a part of our daily lives, especially in this modern era. More and more people especially the millennials day are using it to communicate, socialize and even to market their businesses.

Many marketers and an ever larger percentage are recognizing the importance of incorporating social media into their marketing mix and their use of the platforms is increasing. It makes sense as more people access the internet from their mobile phones, and more are making purchases from them too.

In case you are not yet using any social media for your business here are some facts to help you decide, there are 41% of B2B companies and 62% of B2C companies that use Facebook have acquired a customer because of it. The companies that use Twitter has increased 2x of their average leads than those that don’t.

But are you considering all the other ways you can to effectively leverage social media? Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ are a plus but if you are only participating just within the walls of them then you are missing out on something big and some great opportunities from social media in other marketing channels and efforts. Below are some effective and efficient ways to start extending the power of social media beyond their individual websites.

Ways to Leverage Social Media Beyond Social Networks

• Adding Social Follow Buttons to Your Site: If you want to increase your presence to your social media then you should maximize your potential to get more views. You will have a better opportunity for spreading your content and have more potential customers if you have a means for them to share, like, and maybe follow your accounts. What are some ways to maximize your social reach? There are many ways to do this, starting with your own website. Be sure that visitors can clearly see where to find you on social media through adding social media subscription or follow buttons to different parts of your website. Add your button to your homepage,  ‘About Us Page’, blog, and the ‘Contact Us pages.

• Put Social Sharing Buttons to Your Content: Another way to use your website in leveraging the power of social media and extend the potential is by using the social media sharing buttons. These buttons are a big help because they will allow the website visitors and those viewers who are using your content to share it easily with their individual networks. This will enable you to then have your content be seen by other people who otherwise may not have known or heard of you and all of your great content. Add these share buttons to every piece of your content such as blog, articles, case studies, landing pages, e-books or any other website content.

• Integrating Social Media and Email Marketing: These days, including social components in your email marketing messages, is simply a Best Business Practice. Add social sharing and follow buttons to your emails as they too will extend the potential effect the email can have beyond the content the recipients receive, and to others NOT in your email database. This can greatly expand the usefulness of your emails, content, and brand.

• Make Creative Tweets & Embed Them On Your Websites: Twitter has launched a new feature that enables you to embed tweets to your website. This will give marketers a big opportunity to leverage the popularity of this social network on their own website. Be creative to leverage every tweet by curating content, showcase customer testimonials and creating a more social newsroom, etc. This is a great new feature, along with the longer tweet you can now make the move to 280 characters per Tweet.

• Take Advantage of Facebook Social Plugins: Facebook offers different social plugins. These plugins are very useful and will allow you to make the most out of the popular social network and add proof to your own website. If you have a Facebook fan business page you may want to take a look at various social plugins that are available which suits your business. You may want to try a few out – ones that may be of use include ‘Like Box’ which you can install on your website or blog to encourage website visitors to become Facebook fans.

• Leverage Your Existing Customer Evangelists: Did you know that current customers likely have some serious leverage within the circles they communicate in? They can also help YOU by endorsing your products, services, and content, thus once again, extending your potential social reach. Just make sure that your customers are following you on social media so they can share content and help you generate new leads and gain more new customers. You can drop an email to your existing customers and inform them about your social media presence and tell them their value to you when they follow, like, and share your brand. Don’t forget to provide a link to a social network that you’re promoting for them to follow you easily.

• Leads Nurturing With Social Media: Whenever you say lead nurturing, the first thing to come into the mind of most marketers is Email. But email is not the only thing when it comes to nurturing your leads. Let’s say that, considering 50% of the leads that you generate are not yet ready to buy, lead nurturing will benefit your marketing program. Just create a good and engaging content in your social media updates, includes top-of-the-funnel and educational content such as blog posts and things such as e-books, as well as more middle of the funnel content and offers like links to your free trial or product webinars. You can use your lead management software in gathering some social media intelligence about your leads. Are they on Twitter? Did they attend one of your webinars? You can Tweet on your leads and ask how they liked the webinar or you can use marketing automation tools to do it for you.

• Get sales Prospect Using Social Media Intelligence: Social media’s job doesn’t end after getting leads. They can also be useful to get more sales. Try empowering your sales team to use social media and social media intelligence as part of their processes as well. Educate and teach them on how to identify valuable information and social cues from their leads that will aid the sales process. Let them understand its value and how they could use this information to help them engage with leads and close sales more efficiently.
• Use Web Push Tools: You can tap into tools that allow you to communicate directly with your prospects through the web browsers they use. These tools can be more effective than emails these days, as the open rate for emails continues to fall into the ‘abysmal’ open rate. Remember that the open rates do not indicate those that take action when they open your email. Certainly, your messages will be seen using the web notifications and you can expect a good percentage of viewers will take action.
• Use Facebook Messenger All On Your Website: There are tools available now to add your Facebook. Twitter and other feeds directly onto your website. This allows you to respond quickly to any queries and capture some business you otherwise may lose or never see. These are easy to create and install and they work well.
• Place a store on your social account: Facebook and other social platforms are interested in keeping people on their platform, so have made it possible for viewers of your business page to not only view what you are selling, but the customer can also buy right from the platform. This makes Facebook happy and your customer happy. Remember it is all about the engagement for them (and for Google too by the way).
• Link your business pages: This tip is a great way to get some synergy going between your business pages. You can link and promote posts and products between the sites and get more attention from different audiences. This can result in more sales for you and over time, more brand or name recognition. That is what it is all about, as you know. As the market gets more and more competition, you need ways to make yourself unique.
• Use Authority Sites To Your Advantage: Social sites such as Medium, Blogger.com, Quora, Reddit, etc. can all help you get the word out about what you are promoting. An example might be if you post a synopsis of a week’s worth of posts on your Blogger.com site, in one posts and with links to the various posts. Again, you get more traffic and it will help your SEO as well because Blogger.com is owned by Google (a good thing).
• Use Video: These days many people would rather view a video over reading a lot of text. This fact, combined with the power of a social platform such as YouTube, means that you can build your leads, get more attention to your websites, and more sales over time. A video is an excellent way to tap into the power of the social platforms. Easy to set up, you can add created videos to your posts or products, and share them on other platforms like Twitter or Facebook, or even Instagram!

WHAT TO DO NOW…

Ignore the social platforms at the risk of losing even more business and views. If you do not tap into the power of social marketing, you are missing out on an ever-increasing chunk of online business! So the next thing to do is get busy and start exploring the social platforms…

FINALLY…

My recommendation would be to start with one or maximum two, become proficient in using them, and then move on to more. It all begins with that first step, as with so many things in life! You will not be sorry, it can be a bit of fun as you move forward!

Make sure you DO have some fun and best of luck!
 

Let me know what your thoughts are below in the comment section!

I believe in ALL of you!

Dave : )