4 Ways to Grow Your Sales With Social Media

In the last few years, social media went from a “nice-to-have” to a complete necessity. This includes personal social accounts and business accounts.

Social media is where your audience hangs out and is the best way to start exponentially growing a brand.

No longer is social media about increasing the following count, it’s about generating leads, web traffic, closing more deals, making connections, and boosting brand reach.

If you are not active on social networks, you are missing out on solid opportunities and brands can appear outdated or not hip to the digital times.

While there are tons of social media stats, a few should stand out to you below:

• Close to half the world’s population (3.03B people) are on some type of social media platform (Statusbrew)
• 88% of 18-to 29-year-olds indicated that they use a form of social media, 78% of 30-to 49-year-olds, and 64% among ages 50 to 64 (Pew Research Center)
• 67% of consumers surveyed say they are likely to purchase an item or service they find on their social feeds (B2C)
• 98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal use, of which 50% are already posting about their company (Weber Shandwick)

With billions of people active on various social media accounts and platforms, it is important to take the opportunity to reach your audience in an effective way. Here are four ways to make the most of social media.

1. Promote Events

The real-time nature of social media makes it an incredibly important tool for event marketing. Use your social media profiles to promote the before, during and after moments of your company events.

You can use Twitter to live-Tweet the events with quotes, supportive links, videos and more.

Instagram is a great place to upload behind-the-scenes footage to get followers jazzed about the event you are working so hard to put together.

You can use very specified marketing on Facebook or LinkedIn to target and re-target your ideal audience with sponsored ads. Companies can also use their profiles to answer any questions about their events or how to get signed up.

2. Get Employees on Board

Use your social media presence to get employees behind your company.

While it might seem a bit nervewracking to have your employees linked to your company profile and posting on behalf of your brand, it actually provides responsibility to your employees that can transform them into advocates.

Employees who are given the reigns are much more likely to realize how important this opportunity shines on their own career. Your employees are more likely to be professional, courteous and supportive when they are tied to their work through social media.

The right social media platform for your company will make it easy to share the professional content from your company or other reliable sources. Social media can be fast and effective for your employees — it doesn’t have to interfere with work or personal time.

3. Support Employees with Tangible Benefits

Through a social employee advocacy program, your company now has the opportunity to advance employees in a few ways.

This includes helping them grow their networks, build their professional profiles, advance their own careers, and even be seen as trusted thought leaders in the space.

Additionally, the more knowledgeable professionals you have working as a part of your team, the more people will trust your brand and others will want to join your company.

By putting faith in your employees, you boost their love for your company and start forming brand advocates. You need brand advocates on your side who will fight for you and defend you online, even when you can’t.

4. Evoke Audience Emotion

Finally, don’t leave your readers and followers down with lighthearted, non-committal posting. If you keep everything plain, your brand will feel generic and lose its value.

You want audiences to click, engage, like, comment, re-share your social postings and content. But you need to give them a reason to be interested.

Common emotions that you can play on might deal with greed, lust, joy, inspiration, disgust, fear, convenience and more. If you can elicit an emotional response from your readers, then they will be far more likely to engage and listen to your content.

Know your audience and what will really speak to them. Look for ways to elicit a response without being disingenuous.

Different target audiences will handle the various emotions and messages in different ways, so make sure you know who you are reaching before you try to evoke emotions.

Final Thoughts

Social media is an essential piece to companies and to individual employees. No longer can you passively post content and ignore the main social networks.

Making effective use of social media will ensure you have a team of engaged employees and audience who knows and actively cares about your brand.