The Engagement 4Cast
For many of 4Site Studio’s clients, and most nonprofits, social media is becoming the dominant channel driving traffic to their websites. Despite that, we are seeing very few organizations optimizing their online campaigns for social media. With some simple improvements to your campaign landing pages, you can drastically increase the number of visits and conversions from social media platforms.
Here are some tips on how you can increase the performance of your next online campaign in social media:
Visitors coming from social media tend to spend less time on campaign landing pages than those coming from email or organic search. It is critical to make sure that your visitors can take action quickly and easily to increase conversion rates.
One approach to this is to create a social media-specific campaign page. Ask users to take action on the social platform they are coming from rather than the standard action you would ask people coming from email or search. As an example, drive your site visitors to tweet at their member of Congress rather than sign a petition.
If you would rather people take action by completing a form on your website, i.e. a petition, social login can ease the process of people filling out those forms. Janrain, a social media product company, reports that social login can increase conversions on your website by upwards of 50%.
Many advocacy platforms, like Salsa, offer Facebook login features, and many content management systems offer free modules to allow users to register or take action on forms with their social media account(s).
The teaser title and description you write for search will not necessarily drive people to click through on Facebook. Also, the teaser title and description you write for Facebook may not drive people to click through on Twitter. You need to develop unique microcopy for each social platform to optimize for clickthroughs.
There are best practices for writing microcopy for each social media platform that will lead to more people clicking through to take action. You can learn a lot from Upworthy and other media brands who are spending a lot of time testing microcopy on these websites.
The hashtags you choose to include in the posts you publish and pre-populate into microcopy when your campaign page is shared can have a greatly increase the number of people who see your posts. Choose the hashtags that are commonly used to talk about the issue you are campaigning about and that have a consistent amount of usage. You can use free tools like Hashtags.org or social listening tools like Engagor to track hashtag usage trends.
The thumbnail image you share with your post on social media is important to driving click-throughs, but you have little control over which thumbnail your site visitors select to use when they share your campaign page on social media. Facebook and some other social networks scrape your page and allow visitors to select which thumbnail image they want to have appear with the post on their profile.
Make sure that any images you include in your content are sized appropriately to be shared on social channels. Each platform has a different thumbnail images, but there are many cheat sheets available that you can find online to help you keep up to date on the latest specs.
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