Most people look to social media to keep in touch with friends, find photo inspiration, and to stay on top of current trends and events. As a business, consumer engagement (likes, comments, shares) is likely the metric you track the most. However, it doesn’t only matter how many likes and comments you are receiving on your Instagram and Facebook posts.
An important question to ask is:
Are you generating actual sales or leads? While social media is primarily a tool for building brand equity and deepening relationships with your customers, it can actually be a great way to drive new business as well. Listed below are four simple tips to optimize your social media pages for maximum impact on your brand’s bottom line:
Optimize Your Profile
Optimizing your social media profile should be one of the first things you do when creating a page – whether it is for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. Improving your social media profile will help build brand awareness and recognition, and it’s one of the easiest ways to make your business stand out. Below are a few tactics you can use to ensure your brand’s profile attracts potential customers.
Logo
Make sure the profile picture you use is your company’s logo or a branded image. This is the first visual customers will see on social media, so it is important they immediately recognize your account when searching for updates on your profile.
Bio
Does your bio description accurately describe your company’s brand? Try to use as few words as possible, to keep it short, sweet, and relevant.
Link to Website & Other Pages
At Image Marketing, using a LinkTree in our Instagram profile is an effective way we’re able to include multiple pieces of content right in our bio. This is especially important if you want to keep a link to your website in your bio at all times, while also directing social media users to additional information like blog articles, other social media websites, or product pages.
Use Hashtags
Just as you would hashtags in a social media post to be a part of trending conversations, you can also use hashtags in your profile. This is a great way to briefly describe your company’s page in just a few key hashtags. You can also add your company’s branded hashtag in your bio to share your community and encourage others to participate in it as well.
Use Paid Advertising
There are some initial strategies to think through before creating an Instagram or Facebook ad, or boosting a social media post:
- Know Your Audience
Make sure you have a specific and defined target audience. You should have a clear picture in mind of who the exact person is that you are targeting: what is their gender? Age? Hobbies? What other brands do they follow on social media? What is their profession, etc.? Facebook and Instagram allow you to define these specific demographics and characteristics about your audience when creating any ad for smarter targeting.
- Look at Your Insights
Not sure where to start when it comes to defining a target audience? Facebook and Instagram make it easy with their business “Insights” page, where you’ll find analytics on the social media users visiting and interacting with your page. Staying up-to-date on your Insights page data can help give you a general idea of where most of your audience is located, their age, gender, when they’re likely to be online, and more. These key insights will not only help you come up with defined target audiences, but can also help develop your content calendar and posting schedule.
- Set a Budget
Paid advertising on social media allows you to choose the budget you want to spend. With driving new business or lead generation as the goal, you’ll know your overall cost per lead (CPL), along with the bottom line revenue goal for your ad campaign. The question then becomes: “To generate $x in sales (or x new customers) this month, what budget do we need to spend on social media ads?” For example, if you spent $500 and acquired 25 new leads, your CPL is $20. Having a specific target audience will help keep your overall CPL low, and further maximize your overall campaign results.
Offer Incentives
Enter-to-win sweepstakes, product giveaways, and unique offer incentives are all great tactics for driving new leads to your social media pages, as it is standard practice to require someone to follow your page to be entered to win. At Image Marketing we typically recommend doing no more than one enter-to-win offer each month per platform, but it is a great way to incentivize potential new leads to follow your page and ultimately learn more about your business.
Analyze Metrics
Analyzing your metrics is one of the most important steps to take when managing any brand’s social media pages. Knowing what posts received the most reach and engagement, as well as the types of profiles you are attracting to your page is valuable intel. Understanding what works and what doesn’t helps as you continue to build out engaging content.
Ask yourself some of these questions:
Is my social media page’s tone of voice and aesthetic conveying the brand image I want to promote?
Am I attracting the right target audience, or do I need to change the type of the content I am generating?
Are images or videos working better?
Am I gaining or losing followers every month?
Have I generated any leads by promoting my company on social media?
Having trouble accomplishing all of this on your own? Head to Image Marketing Consultants, and let the experts help generate leads for you on social media! The team at Image Marketing Consultants includes expert social media content creators, skilled at crafting engaging content for any business.