Turn Those “Likes” Into Cash, How To Use Social Media To Make Money

There is a lot of advice on how you HAVE to use social media when you start a new business.

You want to establish a brand using Facebook fan pages, and connect with your audience with a funny but also insightful blog, while also being available on linked in with all your professional qualifications, and reaching out to people on Twitter and on and on and on.

When you first start a business, your biggest goal is getting income. For 99% of businesses, this means you need to make sales and make them fast.

Whether you sell your own product or services, or a mix of the two, you’re going to need to be able to turn your follows, favorites, and likes into cold hard cash and I’m going to show you how.

Connect with Existing Customers

The first thing you need to do is use social media to connect with your existing customers. The easiest way to make money with social media is by selling something new to your existing customers.

One of the cool things about Twitter and Facebook is that they allow you to reach out to your existing contacts as you create your account.

I recommend going a step further and sending personalized greetings out to as many of your customers and prospective customers as possible as soon as you create your accounts. You want to reach out just to say hi and let them know you appreciate their interest in you and your business and are available if they have any questions.

I also recommend reaching out to your most important or VIP customers once or twice a month, just to make them feel extra special.

Offer Discounts

Once you’ve connected with your customers, the second best way to use social media to make sales is to offer a discount.

When I was studying marketing in the Gold Coast of Australia with a very successful marketer, he was fond of saying “Every day is a reason to have a sale. Today’s someone’s birthday and tomorrow’s someone’s anniversary.”

Once you’ve connected with your customers and prospects let them know that you’re having a sale for whatever reason you’ve come up with. Don’t get too hung up on the reason or having an explanation, I’ve had students of mine literally use “It’s a Tuesday” as a reason they are offering a discount.

The most important thing is that the discount be available for less than 24 hours. By limiting the time the discount is available, you invoke the psychological principle of scarcity which says that people are more likely to buy or do something if they see it as limited or the opportunity to acquire it as temporary.

Survey your audience

Another way to use social media to make sales, is to survey your audience. Once you have at least 100 followers or fans you can start to ask them questions about what they want.

This is an invaluable tool, because surveying your social media following allows you to produce content, products, and offers that are exactly what your audience wants to buy.

There are sites out there like Survey Monkey that allow you to get pretty in-depth with your surveying of your followers, but simply asking what they want to read about next on your blog or what they would like your next product to be can provide invaluable information going forward.

The last thing I want to talk to you about is a tactic that only works if you already have a lot of followers.

Affiliate products

When you promote affiliate products you recommend a certain product, for example, my friend Amanda who is a fitness model with over 100k followers on Instagram promotes a protein supplement and some sort of Detox tea.

All Amanda has to do is post a picture of herself with the product along with her own unique code, and she gets money for every sale that is made. Last month Amanda made almost $5,000 for 10 posts or about $500 every time she promoted these brands. Now obviously Amanda has a huge amount of followers but even if you only have 2-3 thousand you can be making an extra 2-3k a month on Twitter just from affiliates.

So to re-cap today I talked to you about how to turn likes into cold hard cash by keeping your existing customers and prospects close, reaching out to them often, using social media to have sales, surveying your followers, and selling affiliate products.

If you take my advice, you’ll be turning those likes and follows into cash money, very soon.

For more social media tips and tricks, check out a top Keynote Speaker!