If you have a website, then you probably have a Twitter account and Facebook page and maintain a presence on a couple of other prominent social platforms as well. Perhaps you’ve been active with social media for a while and have built up a sizable following, with your audience starting to engage with you more and more.
All of that is fantastic. However, in order to fully capitalize on your social media efforts, you need to push them into the next phase: that is, using social media to generate leads for your business. There are a number of effective social media platforms you can use, but here, we are going to focus primarily on Twitter and Facebook, both of which can be powerful lead-generation tools.
Leveraging social media from a CRO standpoint does take a lot of patience, time, and split-testing. And you definitely should not expect to see game-changing results overnight. That said, when done right, the rewards of social media marketing can be well worth it.
How To Improve Conversion Rates On Facebook
Facebook has over thirty million branded fan pages and more than one and a half million active advertisers. Therefore, while the social media giant presents significant conversion opportunities, there is also a lot of competition so you need to proceed with a plan.
For starters…
Know Your Target Audience
Facebook collects a ton of personal information from its users, which includes not only demographics data but also data about users’ interests and opinions based on what they like, share, and comment on.
“All of this information is available to advertisers through Facebook’s extensive targeting features,” says Dan Virgillito. But in order to effectively use this data, you need to know your target audience as well as possible, which means doing research and creating a thorough target profile.
Since Facebook is “an ideal platform for A/B testing,” Virgillito suggests “creating two different profiles with the same ad” – one that covers the basics and another that’s more focused.
Which Ad Type Should You Use?
You have two options here:
- Newsfeed ad
- Right-hand-side (RHS) ad
News Feed Ads Pros And Cons:
- Previous data has shown them to convert at a rate of five times higher than sidebar ads (Marin Sofware)
- They are more expensive to run
RHS Ads Pros And Cons:
- Larger dimensions make them more eye-catching
- They have lower click-through rates but if your goal is brand awareness, they have more overall visibility
How To Give Your Twitter Conversion Rates A Boost
With 310 million monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2016, Twitter is a hub where news breaks, companies engage with and provide support to their customers, and a wide variety of opinions are shared.
Here are two strategies to get higher returns on your Twitter investments:
Time It Right
Sharon Hurley Hall shares three pearls of wisdom about the optimal times to tweet:
- “Tweet when people in the Eastern and Central time zones will see your update.”
- “Clickthrough rate spikes at 6 and 12 PM and midweek and at weekends.”
- “You [should] avoid the dead zone between 3 and 7 AM Eastern.”
Run A Tweet Engagement Campaign
A Tweet engagement campaign operates in two ways:
- You promote organically published tweets.
- You create tweets and promote them only to audiences you want to target.
A Tweet engagement campaign enables you to accomplish the following:
- Promote your launches and product benefits to a wider sector of your target audience.
- Tie in your brand and offers to world events and trending topics.
- Connect with more of your fans, customers, influencers, and brand advocates.
- Put the content you create—blog posts, white papers—in front of even more people.
To learn more about how to set up and run a Tweet engagement campaign, check out this how-to guide.
Do you maintain an active company presence on both Facebook and Twitter? What are you doing to increase your conversion rates on these social hubs?