Converting online connections into an actionable audience. One of the biggest myths digital marketers believe when getting into the process of social media marketing is that “Audience Equals Action”. Honestly, it doesn’t!

“You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow. Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, and profits. Grow yourself. -@markwschaefer”

There are almost close-to-impossible chances of not marketing your brand on social media if you’re living in this era. The world demands marketers to be on social media.

After understanding the importance of social media marketing in building a solid reputation for your brand, you need to craft a social media strategy & thoughtfully stick to it, while investing time and resources in posting content on different social media platforms. Once you have successfully build a community of followers who’re interested in your brand/business, you need to monetize your community.
There comes the real question, “how to generate leads from your followers that can drive sales?”

If you’re a startup company or someone who has just joined social media marketing to promote the brand name, at first you might find your social media connections like a handshake, or say “weak relational links”. They wouldn’t come with a call-to-action response in the form of buying something from you. First connections are just like “opening doors” or most likely knocking on doors.

Twitter followers & the power & influence on the web don’t necessarily equate!

Even though you can’t reach the level of Wendy’s Twitter account at once, but here are 5 easy tips that can turn your prospects into lead generating & actionable audience.

#1. Identify your Audience & Be Human!

Keep in mind that everybody ain’t your target audience. Stop targeting people all around the Internet. Breaking down your actionable audience will enable you to make sense of:

• Which online networking site you should be active on
• Your posting plan
• The sort of content you should distribute
• Your brand’s voice
• The data in your social profiles

Numerous brands waste their time & energy since they don’t present content that talks to a branded group of followers. Invest some energy by taking a glimpse at your follower’s personas, understanding what their difficulties are and what brands they love.

One of the most noticeably awful slipups to make via social media sites is appearing to be the faceless enterprise with zero identity.
Numerous brands today break jokes and aren’t reluctant to talk with their followers like they’re their companions. Though brands were once assailed for falling off like robots, today followers expect a human social media presence by the brands/companies they’re following. Whether it’s your office place or colleagues’ work anniversary, people are more interested in behind-the-scenes of whatever is going on.

#2 Listening & Responding

No matter how easy it sounds only a few of the businesses are truly capable of understanding the importance of listening & responding on social media. Posting content several times a week or day without being an active participant in the online discussion with the community is not going to yield much. To enhance the customer experience, the timeliness in addressing the queries & complaints is essential otherwise followers count is just another “pride metric”.

Start off by keeping an eye on what people are saying about you, monitoring your brand mentions, being proactive while responding to the community can let you be in the game.

“According to @jaybaer, 32% of the people who use social media to contact customer support expect a response within 30 minutes and 42% expect a response in 60 minutes.”

This shows that apart from responding to complaints, you have to be open to feedback as well!

#3. Engaging with Influencers

Getting into social media marketing all alone is not a wise decision to make. You can always ask your fellow beings to help you out in reaching the actionable audience. Involving & collaborating with social media influencers in your social marketing efforts will let you reach a wider audience.

Those who have been in this field for a while, and have an audience which actually trusts them enough to listen & follow what they say or recommend, might help you to get some of the loyal recommendations to use your product/services as well. These social media influencers have a content strategy that can resonate with their audiences & yours too to get you a higher level of engagement. People tend to listen to their favorite celebrity more than someone who they aren’t familiar with.

“According to a study by Experticity, 82% of consumers would prefer a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.”

To track down the ROI of any influencer campaigns, you should try assigning custom promo/discount codes for different influencers.

#4. Getting into the Visuals

It doesn’t matter which social media platform you’re deciding to post, visual content is killing right now. It’s not just Instagram which is a visual-based platform, every other social medium like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is also getting more engagement on visual-based content rather than simple text-based content.

According to the researches, Facebook live videos get about 6 times more engagement as compared to another type of content. And for those who are looking for Twitter followers, get into the gif game, it doesn’t require any full-blown production budget or any insane equipment.

#5. Scheduling Your Content

The modern digital marketer requires a varied skill set including both creative and technical. But one way to ensure your brand is attracting the right audience & to do effective marketing is using the proper social media management tools.

A one-stop place that can help you create, post, schedule & analyze your marketing efforts for all the social medium at once, just like Social Champ.

Social Champ is here for you to eliminate the monotonous task of having to switch tabs between dozens of accounts & let you have a controlled stream of all your online content through multiple channels at the same time.

“You can post on multiple social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all at once.”

Conclusion

As a digital marketer, our job is providing the opportunities for our brands leading more people interaction & generating more ROI. For this, we rely on online reviews, referrals, testimonies, recommendations, word of mouth discussions, & all the other sources that could lead us to the complete buyers’ journey.

The main key point we miss out on this whole social media marketing process is, we only try to focus on the first phase of building the audience. If we keep moving with the curve of time & interaction, we will be able to genuinely drive them into actionable audiences.