How to Get Your Social Media Audience Engaging With You Elsewhere Too

Post by Adi Englander

Cross-channel engagement has some major advantages. Social media is still the best place to build a loyal following and engage with your audience. The major social channels are where people discover content, build relationships with brands and even source peer recommendations. But for the most part, lead nurture and closing sales happens elsewhere.

Shoppers who use social media as part of their buying processes are four times more likely to spend more as a result of their social interactions than non-users are. What’s more, when people don’t integrate social media into their buyers’ journeys, 70% of them will convert on the same day that they conduct their research. When social media interactions are involved, same-day sales conversions shoot up to 90%.

Clearly, brands need to be active on these channels, so they can be a part of the conversation. But savvy marketers need to remember that social media isn’t where the interaction ends. So how do you get your social media followers to take action and engage with you on other channels? Here are some of the best ways to do just that.

Publish a Newsletter and Promote It With Social Posts

Publishing a newsletter is a great way to cross-pollinate the two most desirable types of audiences—email subscribers and social media followers. By promoting your email newsletter with social posts, you can help advance your social audience members further down the funnel. You can also use social and a curated newsletter to deliver similar content through different channels. Think a quality newsletter takes too much time? Think again—Curated is changing the way brands build and publish email newsletters by making the process of collecting newsletter content easy.

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Offer a Free Webinar to Add Value and Capture Emails

If you have an engaged social audience and want to get them feeling more invested in your solution, use your social channels to promote a free webinar on a topic that your audience cares about and your product addresses. Using a tool like ClickMeeting to host your webinar, you can run a compelling presentation in real-time and capture audience emails as leads for later follow up. Now you can send your best marketing content (like that high-quality Curated newsletter you’re now using, for example) straight to their inboxes. You can even edit your webinar recording later on to create bite-sized video clips for your product pages.

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Stalk Your Most Engaged Followers

Stalking has taken on a new meaning in the internet age – and it’s usually associated with people you admire. In this case, people who like you enough to click on the links you post on social media can be shown banner ads for your products on other websites afterwards, keeping your brand top-of mind at all times. Retarget Links, a URL shortener with premium features, allows marketers to build retargeting audiences based on clickthroughs – even when the URL leads to a site you have nothing to do with.

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Host an AMA

Odds are high that some portion of your audience spends on some bookmarking/upvoting/forum platform. Whether it’s on the go-to for Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions (Reddit) or some niche forum specific to your industry (marketers are partial to GrowthHackers, for example), AMAs can be great ways to grow your brand and drive traffic to your website.

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Entice Them With Interactive Fun

Social platforms are already a great way to interact with audiences. But by building, publishing and promoting a quiz or other interactive content that lives elsewhere (like, say, your website), you can get audiences to engage with you in new ways from places they already are. Tools like LeadQuizzes are great for this type of media.

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Turn Your Tweets to Leads

Just like you can link your audience to interactive content outside of social, you can use your punchy social media content to create direct lead generation cards. This feature makes it easier than ever to capture audience members’ email addresses, though you still need to come up with the great tweets yourself. Developed to work as a type of promoted tweet that allows respondents to skip the need to opt in via a landing page, Twitter lead generation cards can actually be attached to organic tweets as well.

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Create a Social Hub Outside of Social

Oftentimes, audiences that engage across multiple social channels wish they could just see it all in one place. And now, thanks to tools like Tint, they can. By aggregating your own content and posts from other relevant people and brands, you can get your social media audience to track your curated discussions on a hosted page instead of their busy newsfeeds.

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Drive Cross-Social Engagement

Every social platform is optimized for different types of content and different modes of interaction. Some brands prefer certain channels over others. Use all of your social channels to direct audiences to your other social channels. Embedding YouTube videos in your posts is a great start, promoting your Snapchat Snapcode, or even directing them to Messenger for Business. For example, your LinkedIn followers might not know you post the best Vimeo videos out there, but by showing this content off on LinkedIn, they’re now more engaged with your brand’s core content and their connection with the brand is deeper and closer to a sale.

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Further Down the Funnel

Every brand has a slightly different funnel, because we all deal in different content, different sales conversion mechanisms and different products for different audiences. But we all want to accompany our leads further down the funnel to create sales.

By getting your social media audiences to engage with your brand outside of the friendly confines of social media, you’re getting them closer to being sales-ready. And by using the power of social media to influence their buying habits, you’re also priming them for increased spending, more confident buying and stronger loyalty.

A few new tools and some cross-promotion can go a long way. By following these tips, you’ll be well on your way to moving your audience further down your funnel, whatever that looks like.

Contributer : Socialmedia.biz http://ift.tt/2d9Trcm