7 Ways To Convert Your Social Media Followers

A social media profile represents a business’ online identity. Therefore, it’s crucial for businesses to spend time and effort in order to ensure that their social media profiles are informational, interesting and appealing to their fans/ followers. However, building an impressive profile and building a large follower base is only half the battle won.


The other and perhaps equally important other half of the battle is to turn your social media followers and friends into paying evangelists. If you can’t convert your followers into customers, your social media strategy needs to be re-evaluated. You must make a conscious effort to transform these social media connections into business revenues.


Unfortunate as it is, a number of businesses tend to underutilize the true potential of social media. They just use it to broadcast information, add more people to their social networks without ever bothering to get constructive to transform their followers into paying evangelists. In this post, I present 7 proven ways to convert your social media followers and friends into paying evangelists.

#1 – Engage
Social media is all about engagement and dialogue. If you are using Facebook and Twitter for blatant sales pitches, such monologues are of little use. It misses the personal touch and fails to strike a connection with your followers. Unless you engage meaningfully with your followers, it’s wishful thinking to believe that they’ll sign up as your customers.

#2 – Add Value
People love to know what they’re missing and how you can add value with your products/ services. Show your personality to your fans/ followers and make them a part of what you are doing, there by adding to the value chain.
Use innovative ways to show them what they missing out on and how signing up as your customers will benefit them.


#3 – Balance
It’s a tricky situation as you want to keep your followers engaged and active and not exhaust them with sales pitches. It’s important to keep your topics well balanced, and throw in a correct mix of personal posts and discussions with work-related promotional posts. Create a buzz about your promotional posts without overdoing it.
Offer an exclusive discount or bonus to your followers if they purchase one of your products or events. This also helps track how many people are signing up as customers from your social media efforts.

#4 – Quality
Social media is more about quality rather than quantity. Whether it’s your followers, profile content or interaction with followers, quality matters more than quantity. Be mindful not to overload your followers with useless information.
Instead, make a conscious effort to provide quality information in an easily accessible manner. If it’s not easy to access or read, it’s definitely not quality information.

#5 – Don’t Spam
Never spam your followers with unsolicited messages promoting your business. It’s likely to bring disrepute to your business. Spamming your users with too many links to rapidly drive up your social media fan base is a bad idea. Such followers are definitely not going to sign up as customers for sure.

#6 – Be Authentic
Social media demands authenticity from all parties involved – whether it’s business owners or followers. If your followers doubt your authenticity, they will jump ship faster than you can imagine. And it’s not just authenticity, humility and honesty is equally important. People love to interact with businesses that they like and who are like them. Being honest, open and humble helps transition your social media followers into paying evangelists.

#7 – Innovate
Don’t’ be afraid to try out new things to impress your followers. Many businesses have leveraged exciting new tools such as Groupon coupled with social media to tap the collective buying power to give businesses exposure and guaranteed customers. Further, it may be a good idea to conduct Meetups every once in a while to come face to face with your customers. Or perhaps, conduct a webinar or publish a free eBook to help your followers.