Everybody and their mother is using social media in some way these days – in fact, there’s now an estimated 2.62 billion active users of social platforms, and rising every day.
Heck, even dogs now have their own social media accounts.
However, it goes without saying that social media has significantly more potential than merely serving as a forum for sharing selfies and memes.
That potential is something that’s been recognized by nearly every company as an opportunity to help grow their business – many brands even feel ‘invisible’ without some type of social media presence.
In some ways, this is true – social media can be used as a powerful marketing tool by businesses in nearly every type of industry.
However, while social is a valuable marketing tools, the biggest mistake that most businesses make with their social media efforts is that they focus too much on vanity metrics.
How many followers do you have? How many likes or shares do you get?
The bottom line is that these types of metrics don’t actually matter beyond the superficial glamour of it all.
As a business, what matters is your actual bottom line.
It doesn’t matter if you have 100k followers if that audience never converts into customers in any way.
So how can you monetize your social media accounts to encourage conversions?
Here are three ways to get started.
#1 – Direct Sales
The first example is perhaps the most obvious, but also an often overlooked opportunity.
There are various ways to make direct sales to your social media audience – however many businesses seem to forget that this is even an option because there’s so much social media advice out there which warns against too much self-promotion.
100% – this is true – not every post can be about your next ‘big sale’ or fancy-shmancy new product feature – otherwise you won’t have an audience to try and sell to at all.
That being said, there is a time and place where making a direct CTA is appropriate. This is particularly effective when you have the right balance between interesting content and an appealing product.
I’ll admit, some industries are better suited to direct sales on social media. Interior design, furniture, fashion, real estate, and other visually-appealing businesses usually do better, simply because the visual nature of their products is more appealing in the social content environment.
#2 – Video Marketing
2018 is the year of video, and it’s estimated that up to 80% of all internet traffic will be video by 2019.
It’s also no secret that YouTube and Facebook can pay dividends with the right amount of traffic, while there’s also huge potential for earning as an influencer or affiliate marketer that produces top quality content.
So forget about leads for a moment (I know – hard to do) and let’s focus on monetizing social media by leveraging better video content.
There are a few ways to make money with video content:
- Ad revenue from racking up views
- Influencer promotion
- Affiliate marketing
#3 – Lead Generation
This is a super important method for monetization that every business should be focused on when trying to get more out of their social media accounts.
Every user that joins your audience on social media is a potential customer – it just takes a little bit of strategy to start converting them.
There are so many ways to generate leads from social media that it can sometimes be overwhelming, however the biggest mistake that most businesses make is operating their social media with the assumption that leads will just appear based on the mere existence of their accounts.
Unfortunately, this is very rarely the case.
It’s entirely necessary to employ additional marketing strategies in order to capture leads. While there is cross-over, building an engaged audience and converting them into leads are two very different practices.
As you can see, there are a heap of ways to monetize social media audience, but you need to actively utilize methods to guide your audience along, and not settle for mere vanity metrics.
