If you’re using social media to promote your small business and your current social strategies are not getting the results you had hoped for, here are 5 key areas that you might want to consider drilling down into to improve the conversions you get from your social media marketing efforts.

1) Write Customer Focused Twitter Copy

Twitter is not a successful medium to shout about your products or services, it’s a fast paced social board with that users only take notice of a tweet that has their interests in mind. Before you post a tweet review it thoroughly for any of the following words such as Me, My and Our and any other words focused on you, your brand or your products and services.

Instead use words such as You, Your and Yours to shine the spotlight on your customer’s pain instead. Instead of tweeting “Visit our web page to download our latest WordPress calendar widget” you can turn this round to “Have you been looking for the ultimate calendar widget for your blog? Download your free copy of WidgCal here: mynewwidgcal.com”.

Remember you’re not posting on Twitter to sell, your tweeting to get people curios so they engage with your content. Once you have a customer’s engagement they trust you more and that’s the key basis for  a successful conversion. If you want to learn more about how to write great headlines and copy grab yourself a copy of “Tested Advertising Methods” written by John Caples from Amazon. It’s the best book in it’s genre by far and will certainly help you write higher converting copy on Twitter.

2) Facebook Is Visual

Whilst Facebook may be the most popular social networking platform on the planet it’s users still have a short attention span so you have a limited window of time to attract their attention. When posting content to Facebook make sure you are using video and pictures as your main content marketing media.

Avoid using long text based postings on Facebook as viewers will switch off. Facebook users prefer to click on (and share) visual media and the platform has been designed to make this sort of content stand out more on a user’s timeline. Also when using visual media avoid the temptation to duplicate the description of what’s in a video, instead create a short curios call to action text in your post that encourages the user to click and play.  If you are looking to increase traffic to your website from Facebook, consider using an engaging screen grab picture of your video with a link to the actual video on your website to help drive conversion.

3) Schedule your social media activity around your audience

Social media marketing is a community orientated medium, so for maximum engagement  it makes sense to be active on Twitter and Facebook when your users are too. A lot of business miss this important strategy.

If you’re in the sports market you could find that your audience is active on social media around major games (don’t forget to use relevant hashtags for the game if they’re available), if you’re in the B2B business perhaps your customers are most active online during the mid morning break, or if you’re targeting entrepreneurs and solo small business owners maybe their social media time is late night and Sunday mornings.

It’s important to keep track of when your friends networks are active, and if you struggle to be available at the times your audience are online then use a  scheduling tool such as BufferApp to manage your posts.

4) Measure Your Results And Adjust

The only way you’re going to know if your social media campaigns are working is if you measure your work and adjust accordingly. Most if not all web marketing is based around statistical feedback and social media marketing campaigns are no different.

Use referral stats in Google Analytics to see how many users are visiting your website from your social media channels. Twitter will show up as a t.co referral link for eaxample so you’ll be able to use these links to measure how effective your social postings are.

Split test by headline and times of posting and keep an excel tracking sheet on your computer to take notes on how different wording has affected conversions. If you’re posting website links consider always using a bit.ly URL  shortener to provide stats on the success of specific posts.

5) Amplify Your Blog Content

A great way of increasing the amount of content you provide to your social media followers and increasing website visit conversions too is to ensure you are amplifying your blog posts via your social media channels too.

If you’re running WordPress as your business blogging platform, using plugins such as NextScript’s Social Network Auto Poster (or SNAP for short) is a great way to ensure that you write content once and connect it to many audiences automatically. SNAP will automatically send a formatted social media post to your social networks as soon as you publish new WordPress content and you can customize the message sent to use WordPress tags as hashtags too.

Don’t forget to add buttons in your blog sidebar to allow users to share your blog content themselves. Social media is an inherently shareable medium so make it as easy as possible for visitors to your blog to send your content their own networks.

Simon Dunant, founder at New Rise Digital