Localized Digital: Are You a Social Media Junkie with a Business? Here’s How to Turn Your Likes into Naira

Social Media has become the number one medium for small business looking for growth opportunities. One of the big challenges many of these businesses face is converting all of that social reach – likes, comments and retweets – into purchases and furthermore, a customer base. A couple of workable strategies to make this happen include:

Make it a Simple Process
Debra’s Grace is a good example here. For every item they have up for sale, they include the price it goes for, as well as the sizes and colours available. An average person’s concentration span is only about 8 seconds, so you basically have 8 seconds to make enough impact to cause a buy in. Quit the general Nigerian habit of asking potential customers to DM for details. People chose to make purchases faster when all the information required is available to them.

Tell Relatable Stories
Don’t always focus on selling your items. Make your brand personable and tell relatable stories from it. To involve people at the deepest level and get them to live and breathe your brand, you need stories. Stories that touch! Dooney’s Kitchen understands this; so it’s even included in her bio!

Use Promotions
These promotions would be follower-based, as a form of reward system to them. An example would be running periodic exclusive deals for followers. It could be a calender type of occurrence that they can look forward to as this would keep them coming back and foster loyalty on the long run. You also want to keep it simple and fun.

For example; “15% off all our beddings, this week – exclusive to all our Facebook fans”

Another promotional example would be offering discounts based on responses to a question asked by you. Veer off regular trivias, rather ask brand related questions that can give you further insight to what your potential customers desire.

Build a Community
Turn your posts into conversations, as opposed to daily updates. Get your followers to share their views on elements related to your brand/business and respond to them. By conversing and engaging in a dialogue, you start to know them, what is important to them and even what they want from you as customers. This is the basic foundation of having a strong online community and more often than not, it stems from telling relatable stories. Dooney’s Kitchen (once again) has used this enough, that it has birthed a whole new instagram handle for this purpose.

Reward Recognition and Loyalty
When you notice a loyal follower who constantly engages with your updates, recognize them and offer them something that would foster a purchase like a coupon code to get a discount or a gift on a purchase. A quick post saying “Thank you @xxxx, we see your retweets and we want to give you something in return” would give them purchasing power and give you further brand affinity.

In addition, you could have a reward scheme that offers a discount on the next purchase everytime a customer tags you on a prior purchase. That way, you get to use them as ambassadors for your brand, while being certain they would be making another purchase. Everyone loves a discount.

Twentysix.co uses the recogniton part of this, making their customers ambassadors using the hashtag #howiwearmytwentysix

A lot of these activities are actually quite easy and cost effective to launch. And they almost always bring back much more than you spend in ROI.

So go ahead and start trying them out. And if we missed out anything, we’d love to hear it, drop a comment in the comment section below.

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Adeola Alokolaro is a Subject Matter Expert at Localized Digital. Her expertise revolves around Social Media, Content Marketing and Digital Strategy. She is one of the fun ones who believe in the power of Social Media and its ability to move brands from point A to B when utilized appropriately. You can connect with her on Twitter.

Photo Credit: Alistair Cotton | Dreamstime.com