Many business owners struggle with turning their social media platforms into sources of revenue. We know from experience how frustrating it is to devote so much time and energy into these platforms and see no results.

It took us years of research and trial and error to develop techniques that effectively leveraged our social media platforms into cash machines.

In this post, we are going to share with you the 8 possible ways you can increase your revenue using social media.

First, why social media?
Like so many businesses, we in the beginning were banging our heads against the wall to understand why we needed to spend so much time on social media. The entry barrier to success seemed too overwhelming and left us feeling hopeless.

Yet, it was clear that social media dominated the market. Today, over 77% of American citizens have a social media profile. And regardless of your audience’s demographics, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are some of the top social media hubs for American consumers, with Facebook dominating in all age groups.

It’s almost guaranteed that your target audience is actively using social media. This means that you and your business should too in order to better connect with your audience and have your business stay relevant and fresh.

Remember, if you want your audience to find your business, you need to be easily accessible to them. They will not go out of their way to find you.

There are two different approaches your business can take to increase its revenue from social media. The first is directly from your social media profiles. The second is by improving your social media presence indirectly.

What do we mean by that?

Direct techniques include things that impact your business’ social media profiles. They are techniques that can be done right on your business’ Facebook page or Instagram account. Indirect techniques leverage social media as a whole to improve your business’ online presence.

Here are the direct techniques we use at Solomoto to increase our revenue from social media:

1. Engage with your social media followers.
Our team knows that in today’s world, you can’t think of your audience as only customers. Your business needs to understand that they are people with lives, hopes, and dreams.

Business is becoming more and more personal via social media and advanced marketing techniques. To succeed, you need to start thinking of your potential customers as your target audience and understand how that impacts your relationship with them.

One of the biggest ways this approach changes your relationship is by personalizing your audience’s experience. This is where social media comes in - it is the perfect channel to interact with your customers on social sites, ask them questions, respond to theirs, have real conversations, and develop authentic relationships with your audience.

Your audience will feel appreciated that their loyalty to your brand is paying off, and in return, your social fans will become your biggest brand advocates.

2. Provide customer service through social media.
An important part of engaging with your audience is through customer service. Customer service is one of the biggest factors that impact how your audience perceives your business.

Just like personalized engagement, consumers want to feel appreciated and establish a personal connection to your brand. Customer service does just that by bringing a human-centered perspective to your business.

Social media has become the foreground for customer service. According to SocialMediaToday, nearly 70% of consumers have claimed to use social media for customer service assistance and a third of social media users prefer social media customer care services to telephone or email.

Social media customer service has also been shown to make or break a business’s reputation.

When business’ respond to its audience on social media quickly and in a respectful manner, customers spend 20 - 40% more on that business and are 3X more likely to recommend that brand.

On the other hand, if business’ fail to respond to complaints on social media, over 88% of consumers are less likely to buy from that company because they feel as if they are not valued by the company.

Learning how to talk to customers on social media can be quite challenging and requires practice to master. Being able to understand situations and respond in an informative but empathetic way is key to establishing a healthy relationship with your audience.

3. Steer your audience to your website.
It’s great to have a large and active social media following, but to make any money, you need to get your users to visit your website.

Without referrals (Google’s method of reporting visits to your site from sources outside of its search engine), your social media accounts will have no direct connection to guide viewers to your business to buy your products.

To increase your business’ social media referrals, use a scheduling system to automatically publish your best converting content.

Scheduling systems allow for business owners to set up their posts in advance so they can spend their time focusing on other important matters. These systems are great because you can build a specific content plan, schedule posts to be published to different platforms, and increase your interactions with your target audience.

Solomoto provides the ideal scheduling system for small and medium sized businesses who want to have an easy way to manage the content they publish on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Our scheduling system has more than the typical features because ours is specifically tailored to work for your business, regardless of location or venture.

4. Attract your audience with relevant content
Just as it is important for increasing your business’ referrals from social media, high quality content is key for attracting audiences to your business and driving sales. It is critical to choose the correct content that resonates with your target audience.

Content speaks to the quality and credibility of your business.

Contagious content will “go viral” and be shared across social media platforms by your target audience. And content that is high in quality will improve your website’s visibility on search engines such as Google.

If you are like most business owners, you don’t have the money or the time to invest hours and thousands of dollars to create the perfect “viral” content your business needs. Instead, you should invest in a service that provides professional images and high quality content for free or at a low cost.

At Solomoto, we provide your business with visually stunning images and professionally written content tailored to your business’ needs. Feel free to visit our post on how Solomoto can improve your business today or learn about all our cutting edge features by clicking these links.

5. Run promotions on social media.
One way to engage with your audience is by posting exclusive deals or promotions on your social media pages. Your fan following will be happy because they are getting rewarded for following your business on social media.

Many small businesses advertise deals or sales on Facebook and Instagram. It is effective for hearing the reactions to the deal and to strengthen your relationship with your audience.

Tip: To increase the amount of followers you have on social media, you can advertise a giveaway that’s open to all who like/follow your business’ social media.

Every technique we mentioned, we use at Solomoto to increase our revenue from social media. Below are the indirect techniques that we use to boost our company’s online presence.

6. Perform advertising campaigns.
Advertising campaigns are great for reaching the people in your target audience who are not actively on or know about your social media profiles. Where your target audience is online (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing), affects where you would want to advertise your business.

Normally, to advertise your business on Facebook or Google, two common advertisement areas, it is very complicated and time-consuming. Our team had this experience when we first tried to advertise on these sites.

There were a ton of rules and regulations that we could not understand. That’s why some of our experts took months to decipher each social media advertisement strategy and developed simple programs that walked business owners step-by-step through the process.

Now, anyone can easily create social media advertisements and reach millions of people instantly.

7. Learn and implement SEO.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the ability to create tags for your business to make it more visible to search engines. Google alone performs over 40,000 searches every second. Many of these searches are coming from users who are looking for an answer to a problem.

Depending on what the user searched and how well it matched your website’s headline, description, and SEO tags will determine where your business comes up in the search feed.

SEO is a massive topic that entire blogs and business’ focus on. If you want to learn more about what SEO is and how you can use it to your business’ advantage, we recommend you check out these articles:

Article 1: “What is SEO? // SEO for Beginners”
Article 2: “SEO Mistakes and/or Myths // Do’s and Don’ts”
Article 3: “Keyword Research and Competition”
Article 4: “Alt Text, more important than you think”
Article 5: “Onpage Optimization”
Article 6: “Offpage Optimization”
Article 7: “Local SEO Strategy”

8. Collaborate with Influencers.
Instagram models, YouTube stars, field experts, and business leaders. These are all examples of influencers. Influencers are people who either influence a specific field or target audience.

These influencers can have thousands if not millions of followers. They can be, well influential, in setting your business apart from the competition either by recommending it to their audience, or giving it positive reviews to critics in the field. There are several sites that are geared towards connecting businesses with relevant influencers.

Remember, influencers influence their followers. That doesn’t mean all influencers are famous.

Think of your community and who impacts how people behave. Maybe there’s a religious leader, doctor, police officer, government official, or school teacher that is well known and loved in the community. These communal leaders are just as important if not more important than the Instagram leader or business guru.

They have established a trust with the community. Which gives your business credibility if they recommend it to their friends and followers.

Now it’s time to put these techniques into action! Take advantage of all the information you’ve learned and use it to increase your business’ revenue through social media.

 

Best of luck,

The Solomoto Team

P.S. What are the biggest struggles you are having with your current marketing strategy right now? Share them with us in *the comments below* or get in touch with one of our team members over Facebook or Twitter, and we will do our best to help!

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