Hey there, welcome back!
Today I am going to talk about ‘How to use social media to build a list.’ You have heard a lot of people saying, ‘money is in the list’, and that is true.
Social networks have made building and widening your social contacts extremely easy. In the past, you might have had to attend numerous functions and paying for food and dressing up nicely just to show up and hand out a few business cards that later got tossed. With online social networking, the costs of networking are zero, but the rewards are immeasurable. Creating a list of social contacts online can lead to opportunities worldwide, something that local networking could never do for you.
Instead of trying to push people into getting to know you or your company, wouldn't it be great if you could get up each morning and find seven to ten new people wanting to befriend or follow you? This is completely doable with social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Once you establish a profile and a following, just your everyday activities online can draw people to you without you having to go out and find them. Even if you do choose to find people first, it's still far easier to connect with them online and far less intrusive than trying to schedule a meeting or a phone call.
Some people might ask which social network you should join. The answer to that is that you can and should join at least three of these networks, depending on your demographic. The more you join, the better and the wider your exposure; however, not every social network will match up to your business profile. Instagram, for instance, tends to be visited by a younger crowd than Facebook and Twitter. If you're marketing to young teenagers, then Snapchat is a great place to network, but if you're more into college-age professionals, then Instagram and Facebook will be a better match for you. LinkedIn is for any working professional, although some people use it to find jobs when they're in the market, not a lot of people know LinkedIn is actually a search engine.
Twitter is in a class all by itself. It can appeal to many different groups of people, and it is relatively easy to generate a large following on. It may take a little while to get used to it, but getting on Twitter can help you create a large social network in as little as one month if you do it right. Imagine having close to 1000 followers in little more than a month? If only 1/10th of those people look at your services or offerings when you post, you will have 100 new eyeballs to market to. But marketing or building a list on social network must follow some guidelines.
Social networks have special rules that you must follow to keep your account active. Spamming people with unsolicited emails and other types of commercial activities are just not ok. If your goal is to build a list for commercial purposes, it's still doable; it just must be done correctly. Self-promotion is allowed, but any time you take an email off from someone's social networking site and add it to your email autoresponder campaigns, you are spamming them, unless they offer you permission to market to them first.
That doesn't mean that you don't want people to befriend or follow you on these sites. It means that you must take care as to how you end up getting their email addresses. Just because someone befriends or follows you doesn't mean that they are open to your marketing campaign and want to receive your offers or promotion.
In fact, if you do send them things without consent, they're likely to report you as a spammer, and you can have your account closed. So the best thing to do is to start by building your lists within the network. You can still post status updates that promote your business or offerings, but direct emails will have to wait until later.
You should have a webpage ready to capture their email address later. It can be a blog that allows them to subscribe. It can be a website with a newsletter opt-in form. It can even be some content marketing site where they can land, read some more of your content, and then follow the resource links back to your website. You can then offer a free report, cheat sheet or blueprint in exchange for their email address.
Well, you might ask how to market to your social networking connections then?
I am glad that you ask. You will want to create a highly targeted list of friends and followers. You don't just want to build a large list of people who have nothing to do with your market niche; you want to have a list of people whose interests mean that they might want to buy your products and services later. You can do this by carefully crafting your profile that appeals to your demographics and updating your status with information that draws attention from that demographic. As you continue to do these two activities, more and more people will find you, and you will have a wider exposure. Social networks are excellent mediums for creating targeted lists because it's easy to see what people's interests are via their searchable profiles, and they can see yours too!
You should use your profile to attract the right demographic. First, make sure to have the right image and interests in your own profile. To do that, you want to fill out the profile as completely as possible. You also want to use your real name, as this profile should be as authentic as possible.
For Facebook, for instance, you would want to add as many details of books or movies relevant to your market niche to attract the right demographic.
In Twitter, you would want to give as many keywords that are relevant to the niche you are marketing as possible in the 140-character description of your profile.
In LinkedIn, you would also want to give a good, accurate description of your interests and accomplishments as they relate to the market niche that you are marketing to.
Once you've got your own profile filled out, you can start searching via the keywords you've used to find others who are in your market niche and invite them to follow. In Facebook, they track everyone with similar interests, so all you must do is to click on the link in any of the categories in your Info tab, and you'll get a listing of people who have similar interests.
On Twitter, it's just as easy to find people who have similar interests by using the Twitter search engine and looking up keywords. The Twitter search engine is separate from Twitter and can be found at http://search.twitter.com. You can find people via their profile keywords, but also via their tweets.
Facebook and LinkedIn also have groups that you can join, that can lead you to people with similar interests. You can even create your own group if that's something you want to do. By networking with people who are in the same group as you are, you will be able to build your list quickly. People like to network with people of similar interests, and this works well when you are trying to market to a specific niche.
You will want to build up your list as big as possible within each network. The reason for this is that the bigger your list, the more possibilities to market to later. Also, a big list has a magnetic effect on other people who will join just to find out what is all about.
Start with people who you already know. They can be work colleagues, neighbours, friends, and family. If you can get them to befriend or follow you back, you have the basis of a good start. Once you have a few of those, you will start to target people better so that your list can be used for marketing purposes later.
The other way to build your list is to befriend your friend's friends on Facebook. You can go to any friend who is within your market niche and look into his/her friend's list if he/she hasn't made it private. From there, you can befriend those friends and see if they return the favour. You can also do this on Twitter by following someone within your market niche, which has many followers and just going down the list of their followers and befriending them too. You’ll get about 20-30% to follow back by using this method. If you get 20 to follow you each day, within a month, you get 600 people on your list! That's a real accomplishment and can really zoom your business to heightened levels of exposure!
Is this starting to sound like a lot of work? Well, it is. But if you want to build up your following, then you must do it. Of course, there are many automated tools out there in the market that can help you follow and unfollow people. You just have to pick one that suits your needs and budget.
Now we are going to talk about how to use Facebook for list building
First, we are going to touch on Status Updates.
Your profile on Facebook has a place called the Wall. There, you will have a box with the question” What’s on your mind?” printed inside it. This is the status update part of Facebook, and it allows you to post links and comments so that your friends can see what's going on in your life and business. The good thing about the status update is that people can comment, like and share it with their friends too. When another person does any of these actions on your status update, their circle of friends who aren't on your friends list also see your status update. That means, when you send out a status update, it has the potential to reach many more people than just the people who are in your circle of friends. You can post several times a day and should stay active. Also, when you post, there is a little drop-down menu next to your news feed. You can choose who can see your posts. I have categorised my Facebook friends into a different list. I have a list, especially for business builders. When I post something that is related to my business, I will pick my business builder list as I know they are my target audience. If I want to post something that everyone should know about, then I would post to my public list.
Every time someone comments on your status update, reply with your own comment. This way, it will keep it up and active on more people's news feeds than if you didn't reply to them.
Then you try to find groups within your market niche and join as many as you can. You want to befriend with the people in the groups too. Contribute to the conversation but find out who these people are who are in your group and get to know them better. When someone joins you on Facebook, send a brief message to him or her just to build up a relationship.
If you choose to create your own group on a topic about your niche, you will be able to attract people from all over Facebook, not just from your immediate circle of friends. That's because Facebook will list it as its own entity, and people will join based on the topic and not on your personal profile. Remember to clearly state your group rules and ask a few questions and find out why people want to join the group. Like ‘what do you want to achieve from joining this group?’, ‘what are your struggles right now?’ and ask them to leave you with their email address so you can send them updates on special offers and launches.
Some people will then think all of these social activities take time, and if they should hire a social media expert to handle all these. Some people just don't want to spend any time learning social networking platforms or posting their offerings on status updates. They would prefer if someone else did all that, while they just sit back and get the emails that result from these activities. While that's a perfectly reasonable scenario, you do have to be aware that just about anyone can call himself/herself a social media expert, and you should take pains to hire someone who can produce results and not just hire pretty looking profiles that waste your time and money.
You will want to see if this person is active on social media. Do they at least post regular content on their selected social media channels? How many followers do they have? You want some idea of his/her credentials and his/her accomplishments in his/her field.
One thing that I never do is to pay for followers. Some people post a job on a freelance board and pay for building a list based on follower count. This is not a good way to do it, as it doesn’t really target the right people, and it is not an organic way to grow your list. Make sure they understand what it is that you are paying for, not just counts of people who are being added to your list. It should be highly targeted people who are interested in your products and services.
On the other hand, I don’t have any issue with using bots to follow, like or unfollow people automatically as long as it is highly targeted and well managed. At the end of the day, you still need someone in overseeing your social media channels and make sure your list is highly targeted.
Once you start getting a large number of followers, you will start to get a steady flow of people who are going to sign up for your free offers and giving permission to market to them. You must be ready for this and create a central list for all these people who are coming from different social networks and websites around the Internet. If they're all in the same niche, they should all be on one central list. Later, you can start to separate them out into category lists.
There is so many email platforms out there in the market which can help you collect and develop email campaigns so that you can track click-through rate and open rates. Then later you can fine-tune campaigns to create income from all these people on your list. they can also do split testing so that half of the people on your email list get one version of an email and the other half get a different version. That way, you can see if there is any improvement in the open and click-through rates, and which version appealed more to your mailing list. For example, MailChimp is a popular one to start with. It’s very easy to use. Aweber and Active Campaign are also very popular.
After you get the hang of email marketing, you'll want to create multiple lists and campaigns for different segments of your demographics. Maybe you want to market lower-priced products to your low-income group and more expensive products to your higher-income group. You can do this with most of the email platforms in the market.
Good luck with your list building. If you have any question, please feel free to send me an email to branding@makemarketingyours.com.
Or if you want to work with me 1 on 1, I do offer coaching package working with you on your business and guide you through how to set things up. Simply send me an email to branding@makemarketingyours.com.