ConversionCast Ep. 1.6: Social Media That Drives Higher Conversions

 

Sarah: Between the paid advertising that we do and just the established community that we have as far as traffic goes and getting leads from a specific channel, it’s definitely been Facebook. I think it’s a little more welcoming. I think a lot of people might be a little intimidated by Twitter and some other channels. And I think is super accessible. Facebook has definitely been our biggest traffic driver for sure.

Tim: This is the conversion journey in 13 parts as told by the LeadPages team. In this all new series, you’ll hear what we do each day at LeadPages to find, convert, and keep our customers.

I’m Tim Paige and this is the all new ConversionCast.

We’re bringing our traffic section of the all new ConversionCast season 1 to a close. This is the final episode where we’re going to talk about driving traffic. And I think that one thing that’s interesting when people ask me about how they can drive traffic to their landing pages and content and that kind of thing is that one of the areas that most people think that they have an idea about and often are a little bit lost myself included is in social. And I’m not about talking about paid social but I’m talking about all the different accounts that you focus on. And so today I wanted to talk about how we can more effectively use social as an actual traffic source, a lead generation source. And so Sarah, can you just take a quick second to tell us a little bit about what your role is at LeadPages?

Sarah: For sure, yeah. So my official title is social media manager and my main role in the company in the marketing team as a whole is to drive traffic from our social communities. We have a lot of presence on different channels and my job is to drive that traffic back to the website or our webinars and just basically get people that are in the top of the funnel back to a place that converts like our webinars and our website. So that’s a very broad explanation but that’s pretty much what my job is.

Tim: No, I think that’s great and we’re going to hone in specifically on some different things. So I’m going to just jump in and ask the question, what channel has been most effective for us so far?

Sarah: For sure, Facebook. Between the paid advertising that we do and just the established community that we have as far as traffic goes and getting leads from a specific channel, it’s definitely been Facebook. I think it’s a little more welcoming. I think a lot of people might be a little intimidated by Twitter and some other channels. And I think Facebook is super accessible for a ton of demographics as far as someone that would be our ideal avatar and almost everyone has a Facebook and almost– I mean most businesses have a Facebook page. So Facebook has definitely been our biggest traffic for sure and Twitter comes in at number 2.

Tim: Got it. Why don’t we focus in Facebook for a few minutes?

Sarah: Sure.

Tim: Can you talk about some of the ways that you use Facebook to drive traffic and that could be– You can talk about whether it’s webinar or to landing pages. Just how the heck does somebody use Facebook to get traffic?

Sarah: So I came into the position to LeadPages, they’re already an established channel which is awesome. So my job is pretty much just to figure out who are avatar is and what kind of content do they really want to see and that’s what I think honestly any business manager, social media manager anyone that has any social media presence should do is figure out the kind of content that your avatar or your ideal customer wants to see. Because if you’re throwing out random blog post just things that you might like but your customer might not be interested in you’re not going to get a lot of traffic. So a lot of what I did at the beginning of this role is figure out what do people want to see. So I tested a lot of different kinds of content just blog post with the straight up headline or a blog post with an excerpt, links to our webinars promotions. I found that if you post too many promotions at least for LeadPages our traffic goes down so it was a lot of trial and error which is honestly a lot of social media, figuring out what your audience and what your customer based and your social community wants to interact with you on and how they want to interact with you, what kind of content they’re interested in. so it’s just a lot of trial and error and figuring out what your audience wants to see. And also your social community can be a lot different than your email marketing community, the people that signed up for your list. Social people can be much more interactive and want different contents, you really have to figure that out.

Tim: And how do you figure that out? I mean once you’re– Obviously you’re trying different things, you’re posting different things, you’re seeing what works.

Sarah: Right.

Tim: For example what metrics are you looking at to determine what’s working and what’s not.

[0:05:01]

Sarah: Sure. For Facebook specifically we have always looked at the engagement and then the reach on Facebook. The Facebook algorithm for business pages is crazy. They obviously favor post that are paid but if you are posting the right kind of content and it gets a lot of likes right away or it’s shared a lot right away, it shows that people are interested in it. So the algorithm expands the reach. So we’ve always looked at the reach number 1 which is just total broad API and then after that the amount of shares or clicks or engagements and then just the traffic from the website, how many people actually left Facebook and went to where I was directing them.

Tim: And that’s data you’re able to get even not on your paid traffic but just if you have a business page you’re able to see that data.

Sarah: Facebook analytics just the insights that they have. Facebook insight is what it’s called. Their native analytics are actually pretty awesome. They have been working on them a lot and now you can actually pull past analytics. So if you don’t want to spend any money on any sort of program to track your social analytics the Facebook insights are good enough to start. If you just need the kind of KPIs that I just mentioned that’s totally up to par.

Tim: I love it. okay so when you get that data and you find out the audience response really well to three bog posts with an image and then they like a promotion and then a couple of blog post and whatever. Once you find that out, how do you take action on that? I mean is it a matter of just posting the kind of stuff that they’re looking for in a regular basis? How can you take action on that?

Sarah: I like to look weekly, not monthly or quarterly just because social changes so much between what’s happening in a week if there’s a major event that happened or holiday, things can totally change. So I really look at the weekly or even biweekly numbers and from there I look at the top 5 post whatever it was. Obviously photos and videos do really well but I will always try to relay that to the rest of the marketing team. I’m lucky enough to work on a large marketing team where we have content people, we have video people. So I always like to relay that to our content manager, our blog manager and I tell her this posted so well, so many clicks. So possibly in the future when she’s thinking of our content calendar, she can extrapolate on maybe that subject or kind of a similar post just for future content use that was obviously popular. As far as videos and photos I just to always look at the kind of photo. Did it have a caption on it or was it just a plain photo without a caption? What kind of style? So I always relay that information as well to our video and photo team. I mean honestly you can create any kind of content, you don’t need a video and photo I mean you could do a Facebook live and share things like that. But honestly it’s just taking a look at what’s done the best and kind of extrapolating off of that for the future.

Tim: Awesome. Now before we go any further I have to mention that all throughout this episode and in the all new season of ConversionCast, you’re hearing what we do at LeadPages to automatically grow our email list and boost our sales every single day. Well in my next webinar, I’ll show exactly how do to this for your business. in this free training, I’ll give you a life step by step walk through of the top 3 tactics we use at LeadPages to automatically grow our own list week after week. This is going to be everything you need to know to implement this in your business. So make sure you check it out. To reserve your spot on the webinar, text LEADPAGESLIVE to 33444. That’s all one word, LEADPAGESLIVE to 33444 or head to leadpageswebinar.com.

All right let’s get back to it. And most of the time when you’re posting things whether it’s in our Facebook communities or on the LeadPages pages or whatever, when you’re posting things is it almost always designed to promote some external piece of content or sometimes is it that post itself is just meant to increase engagement?

Sarah: Oh totally. We like to mix it up between. You don’t want to be totally self-promotional all the time. obviously if you’re a business and you have a Facebook page, you’re trying to get people to opt in or you’re trying to get people on the top of your funnel get engage with your business somehow but you don’t want to be 100% self-promotional so we do a lot of quirky little things, post a picture of LeadPages people in Halloween customers or post a video a silly video of bloopers that we did from the week before. So taking extra pieces of content that might be from your workplace culture if you had a larger business or just even little things, celebrating a little holidays here and there that are just completely un-promotional just so that your community can see hey this is the person behind this. They have a personality and a brand and they’re trying to interact with me and they’re not just pushing their content or their promotion in my face all day long.

Tim: Okay. So you mix it up. You do these fun things. You find the kind of content that they want, you send them to the kind of content that they’re interested in. I think the other thing I wanted to ask about when it comes to Facebook is you’re talking about the various posts but is that the best way to get a community engaged? Because I know that we’ve got a few different Facebook communities that we’re working with and Jeff is going to be talking about that a little bit later. Tay is going to be talking about that on another episode as well. But is that the best way to get the community engaged or are there other things that you have found that work?

[0:10:31]

Sarah: Yeah, I would say for Facebook and just a side note every community and every channel is so different and the people that are on that community are very different the way they like to interact. I’ll speak differently to someone on Twitter it’s a little more casual because we only have a 140 characters. But on Facebook you can be a little bit more long. But specifically for Facebook I think that for building community you really do want to look at the numbers, look at the data, but also just consider who your audience is and what they’re looking for and if they really like something we released short little things. How do we post a GIF to Facebook. We made this I think it was a 30 second video and it was just honestly jus the instructions on how to post a GIF to Facebook and it was our most popular post of the quarter.

Tim: Wow.

Sarah: So even posting informational things that your audience cares about they’ll see you as a helpful, authoritative source that they can go to in the future not just for landing pages but just for general marketing advise or someone they can rely on and a brand that they can trust.

Tim: All right. So I think Facebook is something that it’s a little bit easier to understand. I mean there’s a lot to it but it’s something that people are starting to get a grasp on a little bit better and maybe this is just my own personal bias speaking. But Twitter is the channel that for me beyond just tweeting out some fun things and following people and retweeting. Twitter is the one that I’m just having the hardest time understanding how to best use it for business. So can you maybe share some of the things that you’re doing that have made Twitter a valuable asset for LeadPages?

Sarah: Yeah. So I kind of do the same testing that I did with Facebook with Twitter. How many tweets a day? What gets our optimal engagement? What do people want to see? Because it’s honestly different from Facebook. You can send out so much more content on Twitter. You could be tweeting every 10 minutes if you want and people will only see it if they happen to be on Twitter. So you have a lot more opportunity to test more content out. So I definitely did that at the beginning with tweeter just figuring out how many tweets a day. Is 24 tweets a day too much or is 12 tweets a day too much? Why define the kind of right number based on the engagement and the traffic back to our website? And then on top of that Twitter is obviously super powerful for hashtags. We use a lot of hashtag whether it’s a landing page review or we have a recent entrepreneurship report so a lot of entrepreneurship hashtags, different variations of that. And also another thing is just getting involved with other people on Twitter. The more that you interact with people the more that your handle will be seen on other pages and another streams. So for example we decided to try out a Twitter chat so that’s just a weekly kind of hangout and we have a different topic every week. I proposed questions and we just use the hashtag LeadPages chat. And it honestly helped so much with engagement because all the other people that were tweeting at LeadPages this is my respond hashtag LeadPages chat. All of their followers were seeing LeadPages and we would have other people jumping in on random conversations. so that’s just one example of something that we’ve kind of tested out and just started reach on Twitter figured out but also just interacting with anyone that interacts with you. You know if someone shares something that you post, thank them for it. Don’t just sit there and have radio silence and just send out tweets and tweets and tweets. You really have to interact on Twitter for sure if you want to get your engagement up.

Tim: And I guess as we close out, there’s one last thing I want to ask and that is are there any other social channels that you’re finding that are valuable for LeadPages. Now I understand that every business is different and for some businesses Pinterest might be the best thing or Snapchat or whatever but for LeadPages specifically are you finding that any other channels are either are valuable or are probably becoming more important?

Sarah: I think Instagram for sure is going to become more important for us just because now it’s part of Facebook and they have just powerful advertising capabilities so I think we’re slowly testing out different sponsored post but also just the same way as Twitter. The hashtags on Instagram have crazy power. So many people use hashtags that you can really get your content seen and actually a ton of marketers and people who use landing pages are on Instagram because they’re solopreneurs. They’re trying to get all their info out, share their content so Instagram I really think right now it’s not a huge traffic driver but I think as it grows and the advertising opportunities grow and it expands because of the Facebook features that will be included, I think it will be really valuable for us.

Tim: That’s awesome, Sarah. Thank you so much for sharing this guidance with us. We really appreciate it.

Sarah: Yeah no problem. Thank you.