I know what you’re thinking - it’s tough to increase reach, engagement, and earn sales from social media.
You bend over backwards, do all sorts of tricks, pay someone who claims to know how to increase traffic… Heck, it’s expensive and time consuming!
And if you have zero budget…. Getting organic traffic is your only option at this point.
And this is what I’ll teach you today - how to increase followers, fans and sales with social media marketing.
Should You Have a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
So the theory for my Organic social media Marketing Strategy for has been that "Live video gets a boost in the algorithm"
And indeed I've had multiple videos "reach" more people than I have on my fanpage...
But with that said... The follower/fan growth is SLOW unless I keep pushing traffic to my fanpage.
And I don't want to email that or promote it on YouTube anymore...
It is a 'waste' of a call to action, really.
So this has me curious how good of a 'discovery' platform is Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms for audience growth.
Early signs are that social media Marketing is quite poor at getting reach to new audience segments you are not already connected to.
Rubbish as my British friends would say.
But I'm still early in the data, to be honest and I'm going to be adapting my approach to get the content up there with less time and effort.
Secondly, this also has me analyzing where my energy is flowing...
Because GROWTH happens where our energy flows...
And flowing more of my energy to Facebook where I have 800 fans while not increasing my energy towards YouTube where I have 100,000+ subscribers is crazy...
Also... It is 100% clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that YouTube and Google+Wordpress are FAR superior discovery platforms than most other social media platforms.
Not even a question.
Just calling a spade a spade based on the data.
Final data point...
Wifey's live streams with her fan page that has about 900,000 fans we grew organically in the 'good old days' of social media marketing...
She has seen an increase in all of her engagement numbers across the board...
Big time, actually...
But the fan growth isn't huge, to be honest. Which for her is fine...
She is REACHING more people than ever from the big audience she already built.
Also noteworthy...
I can track thousands in new sales from a few simple 'mentions' of her products to the live streams and organic posts she has been publishing.
I just set up some better tracking this morning so I can keep a closer eye on the actual revenue boost...
But, I'll be honest...
If I were starting from scratch with NO audience anywhere...
I'd be avoiding Social Media Marketing like the plague!
On the flip side...
If you have a large, un-engaged audience on a social media fan page or group you built in the past...
Livestreaming can help you get your messages infront of that audience.
Now that I've been analyzing the process...
Time to adapt... And formulate my plan....
Then repeat the process...
I'm not done with marketing on social media... I'm here to test their algorithm so you don't have to...
Remember... It is: Launch, analyze, adapt.
This is how iteration works... And this is how successful businesses grow!
But what does this mean?
Steps To Increase Sales on Social Media
If you’re down with social media’s super fickle algorithm and you want to do it 100%, you got to know what social media wants and really play according to the rules of the game...
social media wants one thing - they want to give their users an excellent experience. They want their users to login, scroll through their timeline, click on the like button, click share, post comments, post content.
Simple, right?
All of these actions allow social media to have their users stay on the platform and keep their friends and network engaged.
And this is how social media makes money.
The longer people stay on social media, the more ads social media can show in between people’s posts and on the sidebar of people’s newsfeed, and the messenger feed, and the video feed, ha!.
To get organic traffic from social media you follow this simple rule closely,
Get onto social media’s good side
They make money, you get the elusive social media page traffic and get traffic from social media to your website.
1. Drive organic traffic to Your social media Page
Social media is all about engagement, connecting, that kind of stuff.
It’s social after all, not a yellow pages or a digital billboard.
You need actual users interacting and engaging on your page.
This is why your next step after creating a social media page is to build an audience that will consume your content and eagerly like, comment, share it.
And ultimately, these are the people whom you want to visit your website and check out your funnel and actually buy your stuff..
You do this by engaging constantly and regularly with the groups you have joined and also with your fans by posting quality content, liking, commenting, and participating in discussions instead of just posting your ad or your offers.
I recommend that you join 3 to 5 groups, posting, liking, and commenting everyday and on top of that, you want to be adding a few friends a day and commenting on friends’ stuff everyday.
This is how you show that you’re engaging with the social media ecosystem and it shows that you’re a real social media user, which is obviously what social media wants to see.
How to Increase social media Page Traffic - Step 1
To get more traffic from social you have to first get more traffic on social media.
Your ultimate goal for your social media page is to connect with people who are also into the problems and solutions your products and services are answers to.
What do they get excited about?
Smoothie memes? Health quotes? How to make quilts?
You have to dial in what gets your audience to like and comment.
Master what gets them to share your posts and videos on their personal social media accounts.
When you get this going, you are becoming a positive contributor to the social media platform.
What my wife and I have been doing to drive tens and thousands of traffic to
our social media page is we create these image memes or image quotes.
We publish these images with quotes or texts inside of a picture about 3 times a day.
Step 2 - Analyze and Adapt Your Results
Social media is now giving more reach to videos than to images so we have had to adapt.
So we adapt our social media strategy and have been creating videos and posting these short videos on social media.
So whatever works, whatever social media likes to give us more reach, that’s what we do.
If you have a juicing social media page post videos of you making a smoothie, pouring your glorious smoothies into a frosted glass, talking about how great your smoothie is..
Do whatever is in your niche and adapt this approach based on your niche and your audience.
Make their day and be social!
Step 3 - Analyze Competitors Pages Hack to Increase social media Reach
Social media is constantly adjusting and messing with their algorithm a lot.
Now, videos are rewarded with more reach than images, and who knows what it will be like three or four months from now.
Essentially, you take a look at your reach and use it as your metrics in determi
ning how well your content has done on social media.
Did you reach 5 people, 500, 5,000, 500,000…?
And for every social media page, depending on the size, it’s very different.
When things aren’t working for you, the best thing to do is to learn from your competitors that are really successful in what they’re doing.
So I use this simple and super effective tool that’s kind of like my organic social media traffic hack.
This tool is called Post Planner, and it costs $7 a month to get their basic level.
What you want to do with this tool is you want to set it up where you’re following your competitors’ pages. There’s also a way to set it up that it can automatically track and scrape all of the most recent posts that your competitors have been posting whether it’s an article, a video, or an image-based post.
You use the data you have gathered by studying what’s been working for other people. You look at what type of post that got the highest reach, and you go create your own version of that post and publish it to your social media page.
Make it unique. Don’t plagiarize, don’t copy. Make a unique variation with a twist that reinforces your very own selling proposition or reinforces what’s unique about you and your platform and you publish this on your social media page.
The Secret to Get Organic Traffic From social media
You don’t just want to keep posting anything on your social media page…
You need to know how to stagger or set them up in a way that will be more effective in giving you the results you want.
Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a book called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”.
The essence of that book is basically give, give, give, ask for a sale.
In this game you asking social media to show your posts that you are wanting to drive traffic from social media to your website.
Give, Give, Give, ask for a click.
We post on social media an image, image, social media video, post with a link to a blogpost, image, video, post with link to a YouTube video, image etc etc.
Give them what they want more than you ask them to give you what you want.
This model or something similar will increase your reach on social media and your reach from social media to your website.
Give more and ask less.
This is make or break when you’re doing organic social media marketing.
Keep in mind and apply the jab, jab, jab, right hook philosophy.
You want to give, give, give, and then ask for a click to your website.
Should you Waste Time and Money on Social Media?
Is It Really Worth It Trying to Get Traffic from Social Media?
Yes and No.
Let me explain.
It’s a long-term game to engage in the organic social media traffic realm. If you haven’t already started, I don’t know if I can 100% recommend that you go all-in on social media right now because they are continuously tightening down the algorithm on the organic side of things.
They want to force you to boost your post, to run social media ads to increase your reach instead of rewarding you for your organic social media marketing efforts.
And it is always best to own the racecourse instead of play on someone else's.
But It can be worth it when you abide by social media’s original goal of keeping your friends and families and fans engaged within the platform. You want them to be liking, commenting, and sharing your content.
Make them feel better, feel smarter, and feel like they’re helping people by sharing your content with their family and friends.
Once you get your content at that level, social media will reward you with more reach.
And the more reach you’ve got, the better off you’ll be in terms of getting organic traffic from social media.
Here's how.
As already stressed, because this point is crucial, the goal of social media marketing is giving. It’s also important to realize that Facebook has drastically evolved since the golden days of organic high amounts of Facebook traffic. Because getting a large reach is much harder than it used to be, the capability for that kind of traffic is over.
This does not mean that Facebook is no longer useful, however, it just means that we have to rethink how to best utilize it.
So how to both give to your audience and also build a community?
It’s most effective to use your Facebook advertisements as a platform to give your audience crucial information in your niche and then asking them to visit your website so that you can give them even more useful content. Using Facebook as a way to say, “Go buy my thing,” is no longer an effective strategy.
Instead we have to think about how to provide your audience with both helpful content and community. Facebook should be just an avenue for giving and your Facebook ads should direct them to your offer via your website.
For effective social media marketing, it’s obviously necessary to optimize your website to then show the opt in.
It’s also important to provide consistency from Facebook ad to your website so that it is clear to your audience that they are both in the right place and that you only want to provide them with more free content, only on a different platform
In addition to focusing on how best to “give” to your audience, Facebook is most effective when viewed as a platform for community building.
Facebook is like the coffee shop of social media platforms-- a common meeting ground and a bunch of people sitting around talking about nothing. You don’t just walk into a coffee shop and start asking people to buy a product from you, similarly, it is important to build real relationships and rapport before jumping in and pitching your Youtube channel or website.
A great way to cultivate a wide reach is through Facebook Live and Facebook groups. Both Facebook live and Facebook groups provide a platform for building one-to-one relationships and expanding your reach.
Pinterest is not everyone’s cup of tea. This particular social media platform has a stigma of being only for clothes or for pictures of cute dogs, and while Pinterest is undoubtedly great for both of these things, it can also provide you with some great traffic to your website, blog, or YouTube channel.
Pinning thumbnails of your most popular YouTube videos or blog posts works well in terms of garnering traffic. The more professional the photo, the more traffic you are likely to receive.
Just remember that if your goal is to provide your audience with content, you have to explicitly state this in the pinned image’s description.
Currently, this is one of the most trending social media marketing platform.
One thing Instagram has done really well so far is figured out a way to make it really difficult to spam. Facebook has us all totally spammed out. On Facebook, one might have several hundred comment requests.
This makes it really hard to both stand out from the crowd and to build a community.
But because Instagram has significantly less spam, the fact that you can’t put URL’s in posts, and because you aren’t inundated with advertisements and thousands of comments, it is easier to build community and easier to build relationships.
A key strategy for building one-to-one relationships is to first make sure that you aren’t following too many people.
Follow the key figures in your niche. If you are a lifestyle blogger, follow not only the top lifestyle bloggers, but also follow other bloggers who are trying to build a platform. Then start commenting on these people’s posts; consistently like and comment on their photos.
Because there is considerably less white noise on Instagram than on Facebook, it is easier to start recognizing people who consistently comment on your posts and it is easier for the people you’re interacting with regularly to recognize you.
If you are attempting to personally cultivate a relationship with an influencer in your niche, don’t immediately DM them. Instead go in softer. First, build that relationship through consistent interactions with their posts.
YouTube
YouTube is also an exciting and necessary tool to utilize in effective social media marketing. YouTube is this cool blend of both social media and search engine. It’s got a little of both. Like Facebook and Instagram, you can build those crucial interpersonal relationships through consistently commenting on the videos of influencers in your niche.
Obviously YouTube is also a great platform for providing your audience with quality content.
But remember, if you use any social media (YouTube included) as a means to get people to buy something from you, this will simply not work. You must always give and provide your audience with quality content.
When brainstorming strategies for effective social media marketing, most people don’t initially consider the full potential of email.
Email is like the original social network--think Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in “You’ve Got Mail.” There is so much potential for both giving quality content and building those crucial relationships.
Approaching your email list as if the people on that list are your personal friends can be very effective. People are sick of the spammy and predictable newsletter emails that say “Buy this from me!” And while this standard newsletter style email might drive up traffic, you can’t build relationships this way.
Email the people on your list just like they are your friends by sharing what has been inspiring you lately, sharing what is new in your life, sharing useful content, and also sharing any new courses or products that you may have recently added to your website.
If you can effectively share bits of your personal life and tell stories in a meaningful way, while at the same time sending out these emails to thousands and thousands of people, email can be one of the most effective channels for driving traffic to your site.
Treat email more like a social network that regularly provides positive and interesting content and less like a standard monthly newsletter, you will really start to see those personal relationships grow.
In conclusion
There are 2 crucial things to remember when talking about social media marketing. One, use social media to give, not to take. And two, use social media to connect with others. If you do these two things with a grateful heart full of good intentions then you can’t go wrong.