Social media, when optimized properly, continues to be the biggest way for brands to build social proof, get more customers and make more sales.

Over the past few years, social media has grown exponentially from something only the geeky boys and girls in college spent time on to something that’s now a ubiquitous aspect of life across the world. Social media has been used to grow fans and brands but it can also be used as a channel to make more sales.

For businesses, it’s clear that social media can be a goldmine of leads and conversions if handled correctly. Investing in other channels like email marketing, content marketing, SEO, and PPC is good, but many companies have focused their budgets on marketing on social media, trying to build a following and cultivate customer loyalty as well as new buyers.

 Here are a few tips you can implement to make your social media marketing much more effective in bringing in sales;

Focus on your audience

The first rule of social media is to use the platforms that your audience uses. It is one of the easiest ways to burn a lot of money on social media marketing without achieving much is to attempt to appeal to everyone.  What you need to do is to narrow down your audience, creating a demographic customer profile targeting your audience, and try to find out where they are most active. 

If you are targeting a B2B audience, LinkedIn may be a good starting point along with Facebook because each has a massive user base.

 Promote user-generated content

Before purchasing a product or service online, people tend to read reviews to make sure the brand and product are trustworthy. People trust their friends more than they trust a company, no matter how loyal they are to the brand. You can take advantage of that by encouraging people to post content on social media that validates and promotes your products or services. When they read these reviews, the opinions and experiences of other customers like themselves will make them feel that kind of honesty that they can connect with.

Another way that can drive sales through social media is by encouraging your customers to share their photos online, Also be sure to go one step further by posting those user-generated photos on your own social media profiles. It is an easy way to create loyalty with your existing customers and to add credibility to your brand whenever potential customers visit your social media profiles

Pick your Platforms

It may be tempting to go on the internet and sign up for all social media platforms and just cross-post all your content on all of them. Doing so may bring more harm than good because each platform has got a different user base and a different type of content that it specializes in.

Two or three are good, and you shouldn’t undertake more than that unless you have multiple staff to handle them. When you’ve selected your content, you will be able to optimize your content for that platform and thus get much more engagement. For example, if you are focusing on Instagram, you’ll be able to focus your resources on making quality images, since that’s what gets the most traction on the platform. On Twitter, conversely, making highly informative threads will likely see more engagement and get the word out about your brand more. 

Share Content Consistently

Being inconsistent on social media is the worst thing a social media manager can do. If you want to be taken seriously have a consistent flow of content. Posting consistently doesn’t only strengthen the brand, it also builds good customer loyalty whereby followers will hopefully share and talk about the brand, creating word-of-mouth marketing opportunities.

Monitor Trends

Keeping trends is essential for marketers in an endlessly changing social media world. Each social media platform continues to optimize, and its presentation of content posting rules and algorithms often change. Being able to stay up on these changes, marketers get their content in front of the right users with the right tactics.