How To Use Social Media To Generate Revenue In 2019

Most businesses in 2019 are doing something with their social media.

Nearly all businesses are using social media, most businesses are seeing likes, comments and shares, but only a small number of businesses are actually using it as a tool to produce revenue.

In this article, I’ll break down the four steps you need to know to switch your social media from something that you’re doing check-a-box style and to stay current, to an asset that drives real revenue for your business.

1. The Foundations

As with anything you’re hoping to see success with, the foundations need to be good and correct in order for you to be able to build upon them. A surprising number of businesses still don’t have this sorted. Some basics to check you’re doing well include:

• Ensuring you’re using the right social media platforms
• Making sure you have all of your information filled out
• Having a clear and presentable profile picture even when shown on small mobile screens
• Posting at good times
• Posting content in the right forms on each platform
• Posting good content consistently
• Taking time to engage with the community

These are just a few of the things you should be doing in order to have a good foundation upon which to grow

2. Your Aim

Once you’re sure that you have a good foundation on each of your chosen social media platforms, next is to have a specific aim or goal to achieve with your social media. This may be to reach a certain number of people every week, drive a certain amount of people to your website every week, expand your messenger list by a hundred people a week, etc.

Most people know that it’s good practice to set aims for anything they’re serious about achieving, however, few business owners or marketing managers extend this to their social media. If you’re wanting to join the party and have social media contribute to your revenue, then it’s important to have a goal and to be crystal clear on it.

3. Check Your Aim Is Revenue Congruent

Now here is the step where most people fall down in having their social media produce revenue: they don’t check that the aim that they set for themselves is actually going to help them achieve more revenue. Yes, more likes on your posts would be nice, or having a more engaged audience is always a great thing, but how are they actually helping you? This is the stage where you need to check that your aim with social media is driving revenue in some way.

So for example, if you have a website on which you know that 15% of all people that visit will buy one of your widgets, having a social media aim to drive more website traffic would be great. If you have an email or messenger list that consistently produces £10 per member per year, a good aim would be to grow that list. If your hairdressing business really grows by getting new repeat customers, then attracting new customers should be your aim with your social media.

Once you have checked that your aim will actually contribute to your revenue, then you can start crafting the messages which will achieve your aim. These could be a 20%-off voucher if you visit your website, this could be a free ebook when people sign up to your email list, or it could be a half-price haircut to all new customers.

This is the crucial step that so many are missing out.

4. Promote

Now the fourth method is getting attention. You have good foundations, you have a good aim, you’ve checked your aims will actually help you drive revenue, and your messages are helping to do that. When you have these in place you’ll probably see it start to work, and your social media will start to gain a little bit of traction for you. All you need to do to turn this into massive traction and massive results, is gaining more attention.

It’s a very simple formula, the more people that see your posts and your message, the more people will interact with it, go to your website, subscribe to your email list, and enter these processes which are proven to produce revenue for you. So how do you attract more attention? You make sure you’re posting great content, you make sure it’s easily shareable, you get family and friends to always interact with your posts, you make sure that you’re posting it in the right place at the right time. Organic (unpaid) methods of gaining more attention do work. Granted they do take up time and effort which may be more productive elsewhere in your business, but they do work.

For those who either don’t want to spend lots of their time and attention on social media or those that really want to add petrol to their social media fire, Facebook and Instagram ads are a great way of doing this. For instance, if you have that email list which produces £10 every year for every person in the email list, paying Facebook £1 per person to add to this list would be great. It would mean that without having to touch Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter or Pinterest again, you’d be making back £10 for every £1 you invest in social media ads. A great return.

Running social media ads and creating systems that reliably lead to new business, is an area that we specialise in. If you have any questions or want to know how a similar approach may work for your business, we’d love to have a chat.

In Conclusion

Hopefully now, from these 4 steps, you can see how businesses in 2019 are successfully using social media to bring in really revenue. Many businesses are still out there chasing the likes, the comments and the shares without any real insight into how it will help them as a business. We hope that this article will help to shift any business in that position, or at the very least, it was a semi-interesting read!