11 Smart Ways to Drive Conversions on Social Media

By Preeti Makde Last updated Aug 31, 2019

8 min read

The ultimate objective of any marketing campaign is to drive conversions.

The effectiveness of your social media marketing initiatives will depend on several factors such as the number of new signups for your product or service offering, traffic to your website through various online sources, number of recommendations / shares etc.

Do you want your social media content to drive results for you?

Here are 11 highly effective ways to develop smarter campaigns for improving conversions on social media platforms. While no single formula can guarantee definite results, we have shared some useful tips gathered from top educational institutes that can set you on the path to success.

Communicate in simple and clear language: Write for your audience
You will agree that the attention span of your target audience is usually very less. Ensure that the social media messaging is concise and reflect the intended meaning very clearly. The marketing communication must be characterized by a succinct style that is clear and precise in its expression. Remember that within a few seconds, you not only have to capture the reader’s attention but also have to convince them to act on it. Use shorter sentences. Do not complicate the creative copy of your social media posts. Proofread and edit twice before making it live. Remove incoherence. Get feedback from your peers. Make changes based on the reviews. Study your audience thoroughly. It becomes so much easier to tailor the copy for your audience when you are fully aware of their profile and interests.Finally, do not forget to include an effective Call-To-Action (CTA). Proper placement of your CTA in the advertisement will increase audience’s engagement. Do not rely on sensational headlines to simply attract click-throughs. As experts say, “Your audience should be made aware of what to expect when they click through. Nothing should be a surprise to them…otherwise it is clickbait!”
Optimize your best performing organic contents
Leverage your top performing organic content by boosting it and increase its outreach. You might be simultaneously running multiple ad campaigns so it can be hard to keep a track of them. To save time, use social media tools to automatically boost content that is doing well organically.These tools enable you to schedule your posts, choose the type of posts you want to boost, select the duration of the promotion, and its budget. For example, you could decide that the posts which contain a link to your website are automatically boosted once they receive 10 or more shares. Sticking to such metric usually means that the most quality content will get picked up for automatic promotion.Such advanced social media tools help in fully automating the campaigns, relieving your marketing team of the burden of having to constantly monitor your ads. Automatic post promotion is not only a time-saver, it also ensures that successful content is getting more visibility—ultimately driving more conversions.
A picture is worth a thousand words
It refers to the notion that a complex idea can be better represented in just a single image. It also means that the image conveys the meaning of the subject more effectively and clearly than its description. Simply put, when it comes to creating content that stands out, the right image, video, or GIF can make all the difference. If people don’t even notice your content, how can you expect them to engage and drive conversions for you?For developing right kind of creatives, use eye-catching visuals that stand out. Be consistent in using a color scheme that your target audience identifies with your brand at a glance. This helps your brand stand out from your competitors. It also enables your users to quickly spot your next piece of content on their feed.Use high-resolution images to create photo stock. Use animated visuals or GIFs to grab users’ attention on social media space as they stand out in social feeds.Try using infographics instead of long texts to showcase key features of your institute. Infographics can best be used to share data (facts and figures) in a visually appealing way which is easy to consume. We have seen great success using them to drive conversions.These infographics compel the reader to click on the CTA to get more information, thereby driving engagement.
Create featured content in the form of Story ads
Try developing featured theme based storylines for your ad content.

These could be in the form of pictures or videos and should highlight interesting / unique aspects of your educational brand and generate audience interest in it. It might eventually surprise you with the amount of conversions — like, comment, share, downloads, and registrations etc. they receive.
Unlock the power of Video marketing in 2018
Unleash the power of social video content in 2018 for telling the audience about your college or institute. Videos often resonate well with audiences and are often considered to be more effective in driving conversions. It is generally seen as a piece of promotional content that usually performs well in a video format for driving conversion.So go ahead and create the perfect social video for your institutional brand.For making attractive graphics, you may like to explore several online tools that are freely available such as Canva.com, PikToChart.com and others.
Make your Landing Pages Mobile responsive
A recent study from comScore (a popular American media measurement and analytics company), shows that over 80% of time spent on social media is through a mobile device.This reveals that the majority of the people today are constantly hooked on to their mobile device for consuming information. And these are the same set of people whom you are directing from social media platforms to your landing page. Therefore it is crucial that your landing pages are mobile responsive.Ideally, to reduce the loading time, you must keep the landing page content lightweight to ensure the lead time gets reduced. Size of image files should be correct. It doesn’t need to be completely downsized, but need to be prioritized highlighting the most important elements. Making the transition from the social network to your landing page as smooth as possible will improve your chances of converting users.Also, note to keep social media content on your anding page brief and concise. If you bombard them with a 5000 word note or a one hour long video, they’re more likely to ignore your content.Landing pages are designed to generate qualified leads, much before the actual sales closure happens. So, to improve social media conversion, study your audience in a better way.
Use Better Quality Images for better Web design and SEO
Whether you have a blog, social media page, or a regular website, you will always want it to look amazing. Images help you do that. Take a few moments to optimize each image you upload.Images are a crucial part of all major social media marketing campaigns. In fact, Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without them. And that is why more digital marketers are using visuals in their social media marketing.
Create Variations of The Same Posts
You have worked hard creating an image copy, with a CTA nicely integrated in it. How will you know that it will work?The answer is – you don’t.You can create variations of the posts and test them to see which ones work best for you.Create variations of the same Tweets, Facebook or LinkedIn posts. Try experimenting with the different captions or images or changing the overall styling of your creatives. That will help you in determining what works best for your audience.You can use tools such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite to quickly schedule multiple versions of your social media posts and compare each version against each other.
Test Performance of your postings using data analytics
To constantly optimize campaigns for higher conversions, it is important that your marketing team periodically tests performance of its social media campaigns using data analytics. There are several factors that play a pivotal role in deciding how well a social media post will connect with its intended audience.Facebook Insights is a powerful analytics tool that helps you analyse those indicators that determine success of your postings. For example, along with your social media content, the time and day of the week when the content is posted in your timeline also matters. It helps in identifying the right day and time of a post so that it is visible to majority of people.Similarly, Facebook Audience Insights gives you aggregate information about your target audience so you can create content that resonates and easily find more people like the ones in your current audience group. By using Facebook analytics you can see age and gender breakdowns, education levels, job titles, relationship statuses, learn about people’s interests and hobbies and much more.Social media experts say that the insights gained through Facebook Analytics can provide useful information to run customized campaigns that drive better conversions and improve purchase rate from 15% to 20%.
Create posts that drive Engagement
Once your posts are live, are you using the right kind of strategy to create engagement? For increasing chances of conversions you need to first get the sufficient traffic in your marketing funnel.Getting the desired outreach to drive social media traffic to your social pages organically can be difficult if you are not using promoted Tweets or Facebook Ads. One way to amplify your reach is by asking people to share your post or landing page with their social network (friends / followers).Ask people to tag a friend in the post or include links to your landing page to the end of their Tweets. Alternatively, you can put social sharing buttons on your landing page.As more people start to share your posts, it’ll create a ripple effect. People are more likely to read shared content rather than wasting time on anonymous posts. As shares increase so will your traffic. Encourage people to take action by commenting, liking your social media posts.
Use shares and recommendations to drive conversions
Of any of the given two Tweets or Facebook post, which are you most likely to click?Probably the one having shares, Likes and Comments. This new kind of engagement on social platforms acts as Word Of Mouth publicity for your brand. People are more likely to make decisions in favour of a particular brand based on what other people think and what is trending. That is why online reviews matter before making purchase decisions.Your popularity on social media influences the way your prospective customers make buying decisions. For instance, during admission cycle if a lot of applicants share positive reviews about your college then it lends more credibility and trustworthiness in your academic brand since so many people are vouching for it. Similarly, if people start writing adverse comments about the college then this is certainly going to affect users’ psyche. In both the situations people will be either be tilted towards your brand or move away from it as a result of the social bandwagon.So, the focus of your social campaigns should be to get maximum shares on your social media content as possible. Once it builds up a good traction organically then you can either use it as pin post that remains to the top of your feed till the time you want, or even put paid promotion toward it after it is able to generate up a good amount of social shares, likes etc. Not only will the extra shares add more credibility to it and make it even more popular but will also help to create the content viral.

Finally, How to Measure Your Social Media Conversion Rate

Till now a lot of tips and techniques have been given to improve your social media conversions. It is equally important to track the conversion rate.

It is therefore important to monitor two things:

Click conversions and Landing page conversions i.e. the percentage of people clicking your social media post to visit your landing page and the percentage of people that land on your page and get converted.

Click conversions can be measured using Analytics feature available in most of the prominent social media properties such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn etc. For instance, if we wanted to see how many people clicked a link in a particular post, we can easily check report on Facebook insights or Twitter Analytics to know the number of clicks and impressions for that post. Thereafter simply divide your clicks by the number of impressions to calculate your click-through rate. Thereafter conversions can even be mapped to budget spent.

For landing page conversions, you will need to embed tracking feature built-in through Google Analytics. In that case you need to divide your number of conversions by the number of unique page views. What counts as a conversion will differ depending on your goals. It could be an email sign up, free trial or however else you define it. It just needs to be something definitive that can be tracked.

And finally, improve as you move along. Whether you have a high social media conversion rate or are facing a challenge in getting even one person to click through to your landing page, there’s always room for improvement.

Conclusion

We know how powerful social media has become for the right positioning of your academic brand in the eyes of your target group. It has evolved as one of the most effective ways to reach out to the masses and build awareness for your institution in quick time without costly advertising. But converting social media followers into leads or customers will always remain an exciting area to look for.

This is one of the biggest challenges companies face on social media. Especially for marketers, it is a gigantic task to justify ROI of a social media campaign. Social media conversions, therefore, are the ultimate sign of success for marketers.

If your academic brand is struggling to turn your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram followers into leads, try the above quick tips to boost your social media conversions.