You have gotten your social media campaign underway. You’ve built up a healthy fan base and engage frequently with many followers. Now what? Once you have gotten yourself into a routine with your social networks, it is a good time to start focusing your efforts on turning those followers and fans into customers!

The great thing about social networking is that it gives you an inside look at what people want. When you have a strong following, you have a ready-to-go marketing panel that you can bounce ideas off of and receive feedback from- without the cost of having it done by someone else.

Unlike some companies that rely on cold-calls to generate a few interested leads, you have a community of fans who are ready to find out more about your new products and services. That means you’re already on the winning side of the battle! Your foot is in the door and all you have to do is wow the customer.

Let’s go over a few tips that will help you prepare for the conversion of your followers to customers:

Understand the Full Process

With social media, you have the advantage of showing your wares to potential customers before your competitors do. That means you have more opportunities to convert in comparison to more traditional sales processes. You are essentially gaining exposure, influencing and engaging with customers before they must take action.

Streamline the Path between Fan and Customer

You want the process for buying to be as easy as possible for your potential customers. Don’t make your customers look too hard to make a purchase from you. Online shoppers have a short attention span, so if the path to buy is not immediately clear, they will quickly move on to someone else. On your Facebook Page, for example, make a tab that lets your fans make a purchase right there. Make sure that each post has a call to action that will encourage your fans to make a purchase.

Allow for Soft Lead Conversion

Not every fan is going to be ready to buy right away. Make it easy for the interested person to become an email subscriber. You will be able to build up an emailing list, which is a valuable source for leads. If he or she likes your content enough to sign up for your emails, then it won’t take much more for them to decide they like a product you offer and make a purchase.

Use Different Methods for Social Media Leads

If you are operating both a traditional and a social media campaign for your business, you need to treat each lead differently. Don’t give your social network followers the same email full of the information they have already read about on your latest post. They want to read fresh, interesting content that will induce them to make a purchase. Answer questions that typically arise about your product. This will take a fan from a soft lead to a hard lead. Hard leads are one step closer to making a purchase, giving you a better chance for making a sale.

You want to cultivate a relationship with your followers. Then, when they are ready to buy, they will come to you instead of a competitor.

Track Your Outcome

It is important to measure your results in order to help pinpoint where your leads are in the conversion process. This can be done with Google analytics, which lets you track the links you post on social sites.

Have you started to convert your followers to sales? What steps have you taken to make your efforts successful? Are there some things you still need help with in this process? Share with us!

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If you ask any business owner about social media, they will either tell you that it is 1: The best tool out there for marketing your business or 2: The scariest venture they’ve ever had to undertake. There is no question that social media marketing can be challenging. This is especially true when you don’t prepare yourself ahead of time for the work that goes into launching a successful social media strategy.

Many business owners will tell you that using social networks to market their business has been:

Ÿ  Overwhelming

Ÿ  Fickle

Ÿ  Immeasurable

Ÿ  Cutthroat

Ÿ  Time consuming

We will take a look at each of these obstacles that business owners face when they start out on a social media strategy and how you can overcome them to get the results you want.

Social Media is too overwhelming!

It is true that social networks are growing daily. This massive monster can be a little intimidating, especially if you’ve never been on a social network before in your non-work life. The key to overcoming this overwhelming obstacle is to start out slow. Don’t be afraid to wade in there and splash around in a few of the larger social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Once you’ve gotten your feet wet and can handle the basics of social networking, then you can gradually add other networks to your social media marketing arsenal.

Social Media is too fickle!

This is very true. A social network that is today’s darling can easily be tomorrow’s joke. Look at MySpace: A few years ago, everyone wanted to be a part of it and Facebook stuck to the background like a wallflower. Today, you will be hard-pressed to find someone who is still using MySpace. Right now, Facebook is on top, but this is a fact that can easily change a few years down the road. You have to be prepared for these changes. To counteract this fickleness in social networking, focus on creating a blog that your fans and followers can migrate to. By turning it into a social hub, you don’t have to be too concerned about the ups and downs of other sites.

Social Media results are immeasurable!

If you spend all of your time trying to determine the Return On Investment (ROI) from all of the effort you are putting into your social networking strategy, then you are going to have a long and miserable time. Instead, turn your attention to key performance indicators (KPI), like how many new fans you have on each site, how many more sales you have had since you started on social media, etc.

Social Media is a cutthroat world!

This can be true. Businesses of all sizes and industries have made their marks on social media. The goal is to get yourself out there and build an online presence. Even if you have a small local business, you can benefit from using social networking to increase business. The first thing most people do when they want to find out about a business is look it up online. By having a strong presence out there, you’re giving yourself a lot of free advertising!

Social Media is too time consuming!

This is true only if you don’t utilize the tools that are available to you. Social networking can be very monotonous work when you spend hours posting and tweeting. Thankfully, there have been a lot of developments in creating tools that can help automate your social networking. When you take a look around, you will find tools for scheduling posts and tweets, scheduling newsletters, analytics and brand monitoring. The tools are out there, you just have to know where to find them!

When you embark on a social networking strategy to market your business, it’s important to have a clear idea of your target audience. With so many distractions out there on social networks, it is easy to get off track. When you have your target lined up, though, it makes it easier to focus on what you need to do.

What are your social media woes? Have you found some tricks and tools to help you make the most of your social networking? Share with us!

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