3 Unusual Social Media Tips to Drive Clicks and Conversions

Posted Jul 21, 2015 | Updated 9 years ago

There’s no doubt that businesses need to make the most of social media marketing if they are to stay on top of the game.

Yet, how to stand out on social media isn’t always obvious. After all, if you are going to invest in social media marketing, you want to get a return on your investment.

Stay Ahead of the Game and Try These 3 Unusual Social Media Tips

Getting noticed in the over-crowded social networks is not easy. That’s why you need to continually challenge the strategies you are using.

Here are 3 unusual social media tips explained, according to how they are effective and how you can implement them into your social strategy.

1. Play Around with Positive Emojis

Do you currently use Emojis in your social media posts? It seems that Emojis are taking over, and yet, many businesses may not be truly understand the power of Emojis in their social media marketing.

What Is an Emoji?

Let’s start with the basics. Emojis have actually been around for a while, but they were only very recently been available to use for Twitter and Instagram users. Emojis come in the form of smiley faces or little illustrated icons which are used alongside text to add illustration or emotion.

Why Should Businesses Care About Emojis?

It turns out that there is more in emoji marketing than we perhaps once realized. Courtney Seiter explains a recent discovery by scientists that showed that the same parts of the brain are activated in the same way when we look at a smiley face emoji online as when we look at a real human face.

The journal Psychological Science published a study about the psychology of sharing in 2011, which found that people share information and stories when emotionally aroused. Emoticons are then an effective way of creating posts that people want to share.

But how does the sharing of emotional social posts actually help drive clicks and conversions?

Emojis Arouse Emotions and Empathy, Which Leads to Sharing, Which Leads to Social Proof

It comes down to social proof. Robert Cialdini, Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, explains in his Six Principles of Influence that people are more likely to trust others if there is evidence of social proof.

In the context of social media marketing, this means that if a Twitter user, for example, shares your post, their friends and followers are more likely to click through to your post.

Sharing is seen as an endorsement of the writers of that post, which can work in your favor when building trust and encouraging clicks and conversions.

This perhaps explains Buffer’s report, based on analyzing more than 31 million tweets and half a million Facebook posts, that positive emoticons were found to be a social media status marker.

Top tip: Check out this simple guide by Caitlin Dewey to using Emojis across different social media platforms.

2. Be Weird and Totally Yourself

Most business plans center around a USP, or Unique Selling Point. In the same way, some of the most successful brands have a very specific mission which helps build a unique brand personality.

Personality Is Everything

Amy Porterfield points out that some of the most well-known and successful brands online are those that have the most personality. In fact, she claims that by analyzing key brand personalities, such as Richard Branson or Taylor Swift, we can contribute their successes to the fact that their brands are their personalities, and their personalities are the brands.

In the same way that Emojis help to inject emotion into social media posts, authentic personality can help people to empathize and relate to a brand.

Can My Corporate Brand Really Have Personality?

Of course, some brands benefit from being faceless. Brands such as Apple and Facebook are not named after the personalities behind the brand.

However, we all understand Apple as being founded by Steve Jobs who wanted to make technology easy to use and slick. We also understand Facebook to be founded by Mark Zuckerberg, who now publicly and passionately cares about connecting the world for the greater good.

One of the key reasons why people identify with these brands is that they communicate with their communities in very authentic ways.

The benefits to marketing authenticity not only includes making the brand more visceral and less corporate. Authenticity is very important for brands in that it helps them to stand out on social media.

Authenticity Drives Traffic, Clicks and Conversions

Brett Relander, founder of Launch & Hustle and contributor to Entrepreneur, explains that your brand’s voice is its identity online and that your greatest brand asset is your authenticity.

How to Be Authentic and Show Personality to Increase Engagement

So it’s first important to identify what makes you unique and what makes up your brand’s personality.

This may be the personalities of your founding team, or they may be an imagined personality that sums up what your business stands for.

Once you’ve identified where your brand’s personality stands, you then need to decide how you are going to communicate what you stand for authentically. Ross McCammon advises you to write like you talk on social media.

This way, your social posts will read naturally, will be injected with personality and will always be authentic. This, of course, means that it may not be advisable to be overly promotional online. Promotional talk is likely to make a brand appear corporate.

So yes, being authentic may mean being a little weird. However, always create content with your target readers in mind.

Just as you would naturally transform the way you speak to suit the person you are talking to, always have the people your posts are directed to at the front of your mind. This way, your social media marketing will work to build a community and bring your followers closer to your brand, encouraging greater engagement and conversions.

3. Have Your Customers Write Your Content

We’ve talked about how powerful social proofing can be to increase engagement and drive conversions. Another way to boost your brand with social proofing online is to not actually write the content yourself. What better way to create true social proofing that to have your loyal advocates and customers write for you?

The Benefits of Crowd-Sourcing Content

David Bratvold of Convince and Convert explains the benefits of what is called crowd-sourcing content marketing.

For him, crowd-sourcing content marketing not only builds greater social proof to build trust for your brand. It also helps your customers to become invested in your content.

In such a way, instead of consistently pushing your content out to anyone you hope will receive it, you’re engaging in pull-marketing. Pull marketing refers to the practice of involving your target market in your marketing, which favours engagement and word-of-mouth.

How to Execute a Crowd-Sourcing Content Marketing Strategy

Crowd sourcing is relatively new, however, more and more options are becoming available to help with content crowd sourcing.

—Use Tools Specifically for Crowd-sourcing Content

There are a variety of content crowd-sourcing tools available on the Internet. Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute provides a variety of suggested tools.

—Create a Forum or Online Community

If appropriate for your brand and industry, creating a forum or online community can be very beneficial for your social media strategy. The opportunity to engage with other advocates and community members enhances the engagement of your main site, which encourages further traffic to the promotional areas of your site.

Want to Succeed in Social Media Marketing? Stand Out and Take Risks

It’s a noisy world out there. If you are going to succeed on social media, you need to stand out. These three weird and lesser-used strategies will help you to engage with your target market in truly unique ways that will help to increase engagement.