When someone visits your Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ or Instagram profile what do they do next? Speaking for myself – and I’m sure I’m not alone – if someone looks remotely interesting then I’ll click on the link on their profile. So far, so good, but this behavior doesn’t help you with social media conversions. Usually the link points to the home page of the site and occasionally it points to an internal page. It may even point to an external page. How does that help you as a marketer and your social media followers? It doesn’t. All three of these links fail on two key factors:
Photo credit: esocialmediashop
1. They don’t give them information they can act on immediately.
Not all home pages do their job correctly. In fact, a bunch of them fail spectacularly. They don’t always show clearly why people should take the next step and sign up for your mailing list or download your resource. An about page may tell people who you are but say nothing about the general site (or vice versa). And linking to a single post gives social media visitors no context for the rest of your site.
2. They don’t create a personal relationship with the visitor.
Social media is all about – duh – being social. So you want to build a relationship with your fans and followers. You want them to get to know you and you want to meet the expectations they had when they clicked that link on your social media profile.
The best way to resolve both issues is to create a custom landing page that delivers on the promise of the link from your social media profile and inspires prospects to take the next step on their journey with you.
What to Include on a Social Media Landing Page
Landing page expert Oli Gardner of Unbounce gives some excellent advice on social media landing pages. He says the page should welcome social media visitors and quickly tell them who you are and what you do, building on the abbreviated profile on the social media site. It should include links to your other social hangouts and to some of your best content. And it should include the same photo you’re using as your avatar to reinforce that personal connection.
Image credit: Marc Smith
There are plenty of services around to help you build great social media landing pages. Starting from scratch means you can think about the user experience and consider what information they will need when they visit. As well as the points mentioned above, your landing page could include what people think of your products and some social proof relating to fans, followers, comments and shares. You can create a special page for fans from each network, keeping in mind that you don’t have to include this in your navigation. It’s purely for visitors from social media sites. Don’t forget to include a call to action and an opt-in box for your email newsletter to complete the conversion cycle.
Other Options for Better Social Media Conversions
If you don’t want to create a new page and already have a great page that tells potential visitors what you’re all about or a pillar post that does a great job of selling your expertise, then convert it into a suitable social media landing page by:
- adding a personalized greeting (you can also use a WordPress plugin like WP-Greetbox to achieve this).
- removing extraneous information, like sidebar and footer widgets and advertisements.
- adding a call to action and signup box for your offer.
Hubspot provides some other key landing page design tips.
Earlier I mentioned that in some cases, sending your social media visitors to an external site could be a problem. But there’s one instance where using an external site can come in handy. For example, if you use Twylah for a snapshot of your Twitter activity and embed the content on a page on your own site, you can create a landing page that’s relevant to your Twitter visitors and expands on the information they can get by browsing your Twitter web profile.
Twylah allows you to highlight the key topics you tweet about and the content you share. A similar option which includes more social sites is RebelMouse, which gives an attractive overview of all your social activity. That’s likely to interest visitors wherever they come from. When visitors see the great stuff you are sharing, it gives them another reason to opt in.
So don’t miss out on the opportunity to connect more with your social audience by creating acustomized landing page. Use it to provide more insight into your online personality and let visitors know that they are part of the in-crowd. Using a social media landing page to answer the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) question for your fans and followers, will improve conversions.
Don’t forget to test and measure so you will know for sure what benefit you’re getting.
