How do you effectively use social media channels to gain new customers?

1. Take advantage of paid campaigns. With paid campaigns, you can directly promote your product, service, or any pieces of content you produce. It’s easy to overspend money on ads, so always keep your budget in mind. Promote only what is most important to you, not absolutely everything. When it comes to Facebook Ads, an especially useful option is Lookalike Audience. It offers the possibility to identify and target people similar to your customers based on your imported database (e.g. emails or phone numbers).
2. Share content that’s valuable and relevant to your audience. Blog posts, how-to articles, webinars, live videos – whatever will benefit your audience and meet their needs. It will build your trust and encourage people to buy from you. Just don’t expect immediate results; This needs to be a long-term activity.
3. Organise contests and giveaways. People love a good contest or giveaway. To organise one well (and according to the law’s regulations), can rake in some future profits. By incorporating QR codes into the promotional materials, you can enhance the user experience and make participation easier. This can lead to increased engagement, brand awareness, and ultimately, profits. Don’t forget to utilize a good QR Code generator, that will enable you to create custom QR Codes for your specific needs.
4. Cooperate with bloggers, vloggers, and influencers. Choosing individuals who are relevant to your brand will guarantee success. It’ll improve your reach and cultivate interest in your brand. Don’t necessarily go for the most universally popular people, but rather anyone popular among your target audience.
5. Organise an event. If you’re a local business, this one’s important. Organise a local event and promote it on social media: create a Facebook event and share it with local groups. For local communities, trust and familiarity can be quite important. That’s why you need to make sure they know who you are and how you can help them. Once you gain some new customers, they’ll start recommending your brand to others. And don’t forget to geotag your posts when possible!
6. Invest in various social media channels. Facebook is obvious, but it’s good to have at least 1 – 2 more. You can choose from Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and many others. Choosing a channel will depend on who your audience is and which social media channels they use most. But don’t act randomly when planning activities. If you do, you’ll get lost and forget what your goals were in the first place.
7. Remember to fill in the ‘About’ section properly and provide customers with your contact information. This may sound obvious, but our experience has shown us otherwise. You have no idea how many companies don’t actually have anything filled out! It’s crucial that people are able to contact you. If you don’t provide customer service via social media, make sure you offer a phone number, business email address, and any other ways of contacting you. If reaching you becomes too difficult for customers, you’ll start losing them.
8. Cooperate with other brands that have products or services which are complementary to your own. E.g. we often refer to Brand24 – a social media monitoring company. They’re not our direct competitor, but their tool is useful for our customers and vice versa. It’s a win-win situation.
9. Engage in discussions and be active on social media. Creating your channels is only the beginning of your social presence. A lot of things depend on which social channel you chose, but no matter what you have to be regular and visible online. When it comes to Facebook you can also take advantage of groups. Be responsive – always reply to what other people write about your brand – their comments or messages. After all, social media is for communication. It’s a dialogue, not a monologue.
10. Include a purchase option wherever reasonable. Make the purchase journey as simple as possible. It’s especially important on Facebook and Instagram but always take advantage of the latest features with each social channel. They’re tailored to a changing world and people’s needs, so use them to make it easier for your audience to become your customers.

I’ve done it all, now what?

Now it’s time to analyse the results of your work. Everything we’ve discussed above are only ideas of what can be done. They won’t all universally work and they won’t have the same results in every industry and for every brand. The only way to know what’s best for you is to monitor and analyse your efforts. Social media analytical tools are perfect for that.

This is where Sotrender comes in.

Which metrics and data should you monitor?

Reach
More activities should result in an increase in reach. This stat tells you how many people have seen your content.

Chart presenting each in Sotrender

The more people who have seen your content, the greater the chances that people will hear about your brand and will potentially become your customers.

Best posts
This is the simplest and most informative element to monitor. When you analyze the best-performing posts, you find the posts that engage your audience the most. Was it a video, infographic, or a blog post? What was it about? Whatever brings you the most clients is what you should focus on in the future.

Best posts analysis

Interactivity Index
This metric sounds complicated but is very useful. What is it? InI is an activity indicator. It calculates the individual activities and assigns them the appropriate weights according to their relevance to the Page or a profile. In simple words, InI helps identify the most engaging content, considering the importance of individual activities (e.g. a share is more valuable than a like). Here’s a heatmap of the InI, available with Sotrender:

Interactivity Index heatmap in Sotrender

This chart is based on the time you post your content and when your audience is engaged with it. You can easily find the best time to post and use it to maximize your marketing efforts on social media to gain more customers. It shows when your audience is most likely to be active and most willing to undertake more activities.

This is only a preview of what Sotrender and other social media analytical tools have to offer. Take advantage of them to better understand what your customers do on social media, how they behave, your competitor’s strategies, and whether or not your brand’s efforts are effective.

Wherever possible, pay attention to online reviews, especially on Facebook. Don’t underestimate their influence. Many people take them very seriously. When they don’t know your brand well, they have to base their purchase decision on something. The price of your product isn’t everything and if you have bad reviews, people won’t be convinced by you.

Since we have your attention, did you know that Sotrender is now also a Facebook moderation tool? You can now use it to analyze your social media metrics, as well as manage your Facebook profile. Using the tool allows you to:

• Get comments in real-time. You’ll always be up to date with what your fans are saying about you on your posts.
• View post previews. You won’t be missing the context of the conversation because you can see the original post.
• Use predefined tags. No more confusion. Sotrender allows you to keep track of which comments were under ads, which were responded to, and which comments have to be reviewed.

Remember, your brand’s overall online reputation really matters. Maintain it as best as you can.

What more can be done?

Social media is a rapidly changing environment. The ideas presented above are just a starting point for your marketing activities. They’re not seasonal, so feel confident using them even months from now. But you can still do much more! Always try to follow social media news and updates to make the most of your social media channels and stay a step ahead of your competitors.

Note: This article was published in 2018 but has been updated in 2021.