8 Social Media Tricks to Make People Crave Your Products

Are you wondering how to make a real impact on social media? Social media is a great way of selling your products or services, especially if you know how to get people engaged and excited. It takes a lot of hard work, but the results are spectacular if you go about it the right way. The good news is that it isn’t rocket science – there are lots of social media tricks that make people really want to buy from you. Here are eight of the best to get you started.

Use Great Graphics

Most people think visually – they respond much better to pictures than they do to words. If your product looks great, then show it off with bright, high-quality photos and even videos. Make sure that your images are interesting – don’t just use boring product shots. Instead, use images of people using your products. For example, if you’re selling lifejackets, show high-energy shots of the world’s greatest white-water rafting locations. You can even try a little visual humor. Even if your product isn’t something you can photograph, you can still generate lots of visual interest by using infographics – for instance, come up with some fascinating facts and then use a site such as Easel.ly to build an infographic around these.

Build Excitement Early

If you’re going to launch a new product online, don’t wait until the last minute to start building excitement. Instead, start talking about your product on social media long before you’re ready to take orders. Create buzz by releasing teaser videos, set up waiting lists, give people a behind-the-scenes look as you develop your product – there are lots of ways to build anticipation. Don’t give away all your secrets, though – people love a mystery and will keep coming back to find out more. If you do this, you’ll have them lining up to buy your product when you do launch.

Create Relationships

It’s called social media for a reason. One of the fastest ways to annoy people on social media is to start out with a hard product pitch. With social media, selling comes later. Start out by building relationships with your audience, so that you get positive engagement. Give them useful information, help them solve problems, entertain them – but don’t start selling until they’re ready. Once you see that you have a social media following that’s actively interested in your products, this is the time to start to promote. But don’t just switch from relationship building to an outright sales campaign – think about how you can leverage your relationship and keep your audience onside.

Get Bloggers to Review Your Products

Ask yourself this. When you buy something, who do you trust for recommendations? If you’re like most people, you ask family or friends what they think. It’s similar on social media – people pay attention to what bloggers say. This is because bloggers are independent and don’t have a vested interest in selling your product. Not only that, good bloggers have a huge following, so they give you a ready-made audience. You can reach out to bloggers yourself or, to make the process simple, you can connect with bloggers on sites such as Tomoson.  

Get A Little Crazy

On social media, people want to be entertained, not bored. Don’t be afraid to get inventive, even a little insane. Don’t offend anyone – but it’s okay to be a bit nutty. This doesn’t work for everything – for instance, stay serious if you’re selling security systems – but more times than not you’ll generate much more engagement if you do something truly memorable. If you’re selling pizzas, for example, run a social media campaign that shows how pizzas have inspired great people throughout history – such as Galileo dropping a cannonball and a pizza off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Or, was it the Leaning Tower of Pizza? The possibilities are endless – just use your imagination.

Special Offers

One of the great tricks of selling on social media is to make people feel special. You’ll build real loyalty if you give exclusive offers that people can only get when they follow you online. Try giving away limited-time discount coupons available only on your social media channels, or run contests where people get a free entry for sharing their ideas and stories. Just make sure that your offers are truly exclusive, not something you offer to everyone.

Share Customer Reviews

We’ve already talked about getting bloggers to review your product. But some of the most powerful reviews come from customers themselves – after all, they’ve actually bought the product and used it. Customers love when they can give their feedback, and will often write much more personal reviews that resonate with other potential buyers. If you share customer reviews on your social channels – for example, tweet out links or send Facebook updates – then you’ll encourage other customers to review your product as well. Don’t worry if you get some negative customer reviews – everyone does. As long as the majority are positive, you’ll still see huge benefits.

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Be Funny: The Amazing Power of Humor in Social Media Marketing

Have you heard this one?

"I have to breakup with you. We've connected on so many platforms—Facebook and Twitter—but I just don't feel Linkedin." - Derek Kessinger 

The funny bone can be a fickle thing. Writing jokes is hard work. But if you have a gift for humor, you’re marketing campaigns will be better. Why? “Laughter is a universal language and one of our first communication methods,” writes Angie Pascale of ClickZ. “Before we had spoken or written language, humans used laughter to express our enjoyment or accession with a certain situation.”

I’m sure you’ve noticed that funny memes and witty hashtags are popular. Most viral content is funny. There is even study to prove it. Its results state that “humor was employed at near unanimous levels for all viral advertisements. Consequently, this study identified humor as the universal appeal for making content viral.”

So, brand benefit one: Funny content gets shared more on social media. But what else does humor get you as social media marketer?

Joke from Hootsuite post:

An elderly grandma is on her death bed. She leans over to her granddaughter, knowing that death must be close, and says, “I want to leave you my farm. That includes the villa, the tractor and other equipment, the farmhouse and $22,398,750.78 in cash.”

The granddaughter, about to become rich, says, “Oh Grandma you are so generous. I didn’t even know you had a farm. Where is it?” With her last breath, she whispered, “Facebook.” 

Jokes trigger positive emotional and psychological responses

One of the most effective ways to market is to evoke emotion.

People feel good when they are laughing. It releases endorphins, relaxes the body, boosts the immune system and helps to relieve stress. If you want your customers to associate good feelings with your brand, make ‘em laugh.

“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a press conference to announce that if you post one more picture of your cat sleeping, they’re going to delete your account.” -Jimmy Kimmel

Make your brand memorable with humor

According to Pascale, research shows that just 42% of positive experiences are forgotten, while 60% of negative experiences fade from memory.

Think about what TV ads you remember. You don’t remember stuff that is dull, certainly. The funny ones, right? Little kid Darth Vader? The one where the wind is personified and everyone hates him?  

“Facebook has been redesigned and it now contains a real-time news ticker. Every update says, ‘Breaking news: You’re screwing around at work.'” -Conan O’Brien

Laugher brings people together

“Laughter is social,” writes Pascale. People laugh 30 times more when they are with other people than when alone, according to Professor Robert R. Provine of the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

“Laughter eases tension and forms a sense of unity through groups,” writes Pascale. “Get your Facebook fans or Twitter followers laughing, and you'll be helping to establish a sense of community and building connections with your brand and amongst your fans and followers.”

“Facebook: What’s on your mind? ... Twitter: What’s happening? … Myspace: Where did everybody go?” – Will Ferrell

What people find funny provides audience insights

What is humor exactly? Why are some things funny? Peter McGraw, director of the Humor Research Lab and author of the Humor Code, says that "funny" is the intersection of benign and violation.

If something is benign, it's not going to be funny. Washing the dishes. Setting your alarm clock. Rabbits. Boring and benign.

If something is a violation, it's also not going to be funny. An insult. A scary point of view on the world.

“But that sweet spot between everyday and offensive, that's where funny happens,” writes Pascale. Setting your alarm clock for insults. Rabbits with a scary point of view on the world. Funny?

Figuring out that sweet spot will tell you a lot about the values and desires of your audience.

“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a press conference to announce that if you post one more picture of your cat sleeping, they’re going to delete your account.” -Jimmy Kimmel

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How Experimentation Increased Our Social Media Engagement

Social networks and the best practices for using them evolve at such a rapid pace that it can be difficult to predict what will and won’t work. This is one reason why consistent social media monitoring and adjusting of your social strategy is a must.

Researching audience, testing different tactics, and comparing results against initial assumptions can help you adjust your strategy to better serve your business needs.

We recently decided to do some testing of our own, specifically looking at how industry-related keywords, hashtags, and diverse language impacted engagement.

Over a period of six months, we experimented with how we incorporated these three techniques in the third-party content we curated and shared on PR Newswire’s main social channels.

Keywords

On Facebook and Twitter, posts that contained industry-related keywords such as “how-to,” “infographics” and “press releases” generally outperformed those that used broader terms. Likewise, and not surprising, posts that mentioned larger organization names and public companies had higher engagement.

The engagement numbers confirmed our expectations about the effectiveness of strategic, natural-language keyword use.

For instance, “5 #contentmarketing tricks guaranteed to boost social engagement” was more effective than “Improve your content marketing and increase your social media presence.”

The first tweet did several things right, such as using a number, strong language like “guaranteed to boost,” and a popular and relevant hashtag. We also think that it was advantageous to use “social engagement” instead of “social media.”

There are a lot of posts on Twitter about the broader topic of social media; instead of competing with all of those tweets, this one drilled down into a specific subtopic – engagement.

Hashtags

Unsurprisingly, hashtags increased the discoverability and reach of the posts they were used in. When used appropriately, hashtags can be a helpful tool for organizing and categorizing content across social media.

However, what surprised us is the impact they had across all of PR Newswire’s channels, including Facebook.

Hashtags that drove the most engagement for us included:

• #contentmarketing
• #socialmediamarketing
• #storytelling
• #Infographic
• #socialengagement
• #howto

Not only are these highly searched-for keywords in our industry, but they were also very popular topics for writers.

Diverse Language

Over the last year, Facebook’s search algorithm has placed an increased emphasis on higher quality content that uses natural and diverse language. Heavily advertorial and formulaic writing is no longer effective.

When curating content on Facebook, we looked at diversifying the complexity and style of our writing, as well as the calls to action. What we discovered was that more descriptive, keyword-laden posts tended to perform better than those that were not as descriptive.

Although we thought shorter posts would generally work better on social, on Facebook length didn’t matter. What mattered was giving our audience a solid, specific reason for engaging with a post, regardless of how many characters it took to do it.

With the amount of content that’s published on a daily basis across the Internet, it can be easy for your brand’s message to be lost in your followers’ newsfeeds. Finding a content creation and curation strategy that delivers results is essential. And the only way to do that is to continually track how you’re doing and pivot your tactics accordingly.

Want to learn more about online measurement best practices? Download our white paper Monitoring Your Brand Across the Web.

Co-authored by Ryan Hansen and Melissa Fasano

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You Have $100 to Spend on Social Media Marketing. Here's One Way To Spend It.

How big is your marketing budget?

I’ve heard of companies that spend millions on marketing. I’ve heard of others who spend zero (we skew toward the zero side at Buffer).

Regardless of how much you spend, you aim to spend it well. That’s why a hypothetical situation like the one here—what would you do with $100 to spend on social media marketing?—can be an extremely valuable exercise.

I have some ideas on what I’d do with the $100, ways to wring the most value out of every penny. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have also (speaking from personal experience even!).

The average marketing budget for social media

Before we get into some answers and ideas, I thought it’d be interesting to see just how much social media takes up in an average marketing budget.

The answer:

The industry average settles between $200 to $350 per day.

This average comes from an analysis by The Content Factory, looking at the cost to outsource social media marketing services. They found that $4,000-$7,000 per month was the industry average, which works out to the above per-day costs.

On a more individual level, a marketing survey by the Duke School of Businessfound the following:

Results show social media spending is currently nine percent of marketing budgets and is expected to increase to more than 13 percent in the next year. In five years, marketers expect to spend more than 21 percent of their budgets on social media.

How does this compare to you? Are you higher or lower?

At Buffer, our marketing budget consists only of the tools we use (you can see an exact breakdown here). We don’t spend any extra on social media campaigns or advertising, choosing instead to go the content and social media route to get the word out.

Imagine: You have $100 to spend on social media

Plan A: The all-in-one social media budget

One of the first qualifications of spending $100 on social media is that the way you spend is likely to be quite unique: Everyone has their own specific niche andaudience to serve, and most social media profiles are at varying degrees of completeness.

With this in mind, I’ve aimed to share some thoughts here that might fit the majority of profiles. Feel free to adjust and correct as needed for your particular situation.

Design/graphics/photos – $40

With visual design carrying such a large emphasis on social media (images are the No. 1 most important factor in optimal social media content, according to an Adobe survey), it feels great to put your best foot forward on the visuals and graphics front.

For social media marketing, this can mean:

• Cover photos for each of your social profiles
• A professional profile picture, either a headshot (if you’re a person) or a logo (if you’re a company)
• Icons and stock photos to use in the images you create for your social media content

We’ve written some fun tutorials on what to do with certain resources—how to turn photos and graphics into ideal social media images. It’s possible that you’ll be able to create these images and spend nothing. There’re tons of great, free tools out there.

If you choose to spend in this area, here’s one direction that your money could go.

• Death to the Stock Photo subscription ($10/month) – You can subscribe to access the full archive of their professional photos plus members-only photo sets
• Fiverr for quick, small designs ($15) – Projects on Fiverr run $5 apiece, if you need a little extra hand with a certain design something. They have a complete section for help with images and logos.
• Add some funds to Creative Market or IconFinder or The Noun Project ($15) – Each of these sites is a digital marketplace for designers to sell the cool things they make. IconFinder and The Noun Project are for icons, with individual icons selling for no more than $2 apiece. Creative Market sells icon sets, website themes, templates, photos, graphics, and tons more.

Advertising/reach – $30

If you’re just starting out and looking to grow your influence on social media,advertising can help build an audience when there is none. Even for established brands it can be a great option.

Social media advertising is a huge topic with lots to consider. Guides like Matthew Kammerer’s are a great place to start.

The takeaway: Test and see what works! Spend $1 per day on Facebook and Twitter for a little advanced exposure.

• Facebook ads ($15) – One dollar per day for a couple weeks. Moz found that $1 per day can grow you audience by 4,000 people.
• Twitter ads ($15) – One dollar per day for a couple weeks. Wordstream put together an interesting comparison chart for Facebook and Twitter ads, showing that your dollar per day might gain you a higher click rate on Twitter yet might get you more views on Facebook.

Social media scheduling – $10

Our top time-saving tip for social media managers is to schedule posts in advance using a tool like Buffer. You can get started for free and share forever to one of each type of connected account—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.

If you need more room (or more accounts), the Awesome Plan is just $10/month. With Awesome, you can manage your brand’s accounts plus keep your personal queues full also.

• Buffer for social media scheduling ($10) – Schedule your posts ahead of time, follow up with full analytics afterward. Non-profits get a discount, too, if that might apply for you.

Audience research – Free

One of the key things we’ve learned about social media is that it’s hugely helpful to listen to the people you’re talking with online. What are their needs? Their problems? Their favorite things? A lot of this falls under the umbrella ofaudience research—finding your audience, engaging with them, and asking them what they’d like to see and hear.

Many elements of audience research can be had for free. If you find one that works well for you, that could be the one worth spending a bit of your $100.

• Followerwonk for Twitter research (free) – Managed by Moz, this tool lets you dig into your Twitter audience: Who are your followers? Where are they located? When do they tweet? The basic version is free, or you can upgrade by snagging a Moz Pro subscription ($99/month)
• Facebook Audience Insights (free) – The robust audience creation tool from Facebook lets you create any sort of target demographic—by region, by age and gender, by interest, by page likes, and more—and shows you the break down of the audience slice you’ve chosen.
• Typeform for surveys (free) – Send out simple surveys with TypeForm to get to know your audience better. It works great to tweet these survey links or post them to social.

It'd be so great to have you involved in content planning on the Buffer blog in 2015! We've got a quick survey here: http://t.co/1e20gY2Rto

— Kevan Lee (@kevanlee) January 7, 2015

Analytics – $10

Your social media dashboard (Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, etc.) likely has a good deal of analytics already built in. To stay super lean (and cheap), you could stick with these free options and move more of your money into design or advertising. If you’re up for spending a little to learn what’s working on social, here’re some great options, too.

• Chartbeat real-time analytics for your site ($10/month) – Useful for seeing in real-time which visitors on your site have come from social media. Recommended for websites big enough to have multiple people visiting at once.
• SumAll report dashboards and emails (free) – Know what you’re doing well on social media (so you can keep on doing it) by connecting your accounts here and signing up for daily or weekly emails.

Sharing buttons – $10

For your website or blog, you can boost your social media marketing by making it easy for others to share your content. On the Buffer blog, we use the free Digg Digg WordPress plugin. If you’re after something a bit more customizable and premium, one of the following might be a good route to go (each has a free version as well).

• Flare ($9/month)
• SumoMe ($10/month)

Total spend: $100

Plan B: Invest in education

The inspiration for the $100 question came from a post on Inbound.org, asking what you’d do with $1,000 to start an online marketing strategy. (Tons of great answers there, too, if you’re curious!)

One of the takeaways I learned there is that it can sometimes be best to invest your money on educating yourself.

With that in mind, here’re some options for how to spend $100 on social media education.

Great books to read – $60

We’re incredibly grateful for the chance to learn from so many good books. Reading is a bit of a passion of ours (and, I’d guess, maybe yours too?). I read a cool quote from author Ryan Holiday:

I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it.

It’s great advice, and we’ve taken it a bit to heart here with these book recommendations (books make up a significant part of the $100 budget in this section).

• Tribes by Seth Godin ($12)
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini ($11)
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie ($11) – A Buffer favorite!
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk ($15)
• Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah ($10)

How To Grow With Inbound Marketing from HubSpot

Helpful ebooks and blogs – $20

• Copyhackers’s ebook: Headlines, Subheads & Value Propositions ($20)
• The 50 most-loved blogs of Buffer readers
• 10 marketing blogs for intermediate and advanced marketers

Great communities to join – Free

Being able to tap into the shared knowledge of a big group of experts or like-minded peers is a huge advantage and privilege. In terms of social media marketing, these few (free) communities have some of the best advice and most knowledgeable participants:

• Inbound.org (free)
• Growth Hackers (free)
• Quibb (free) – A members-only network that shares useful link and news

Miscellaneous resources – Free

• Primer by Google (free)
• Rainmaker.fm podcasts (free)
• Growth.Supply’s list of free social media resources (free)

Total spend: $100

Plan C: Advertising-focused

Let’s say you have a good grip on your social media marketing workflows. You’re in a groove with your scheduling, your content, your followup and reporting. Maybe you’d just like to grow with a little paid promotion and reach.

Here are some options for spending the $100 toward advertising particularly.

Facebook ads – $40

With Facebook, you have many different ways of approaching an ad campaign, and all these ways can typically fall within these three categories of benefits:

• Interaction: Your ad and content right on the homepage allows users to interact with it like they do any other piece of social content.
• Reach: Expand your reach to new potential customers who can interact with your content by commenting, liking, favoriting, retweeting, etc.
• Followers: Brands also report a notable increase in followers through these social advertising options, since brand visibility increases significantly.

(The same goes for Twitter and LinkedIn ads, too.)

For small budgets, you’re likely to get the most bang for your buck with boosting reach. As mentioned above, reach can grow in some cases by as much as 4,000 new people with only $1 per day.

Twitter ads – $40

Like Facebook, Twitter gives you a number of ways to get your content in front of more people. Here’s a list of possible paid routes with Twitter:

• Get more followers
• Get more clicks
• Get more retweets, favorites, replies
• Collect leads
• Drive engagement for your app

Many of these different forms of Twitter advertising have to do with Twitter cards, which are a media-rich version of a standard tweet.

LinkedIn – $20

LinkedIn gives you the option to create an ad (similar to a display ad or a Facebook ad) or to sponsor existing content (similar to boosting a post).

If you’re interested in diving deeper into LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook ads, lots more info on social media advertising can be found in our guide.

Total spend: $100

Big-picture ideas on how to spend money

1. Spend your money on what you can’t do well

If you lack a certain expertise in an area, this could be a great signal that it’d be worth it to pay someone else to take over.

2. Spend your money on what takes you the most time

Time is money, as they say. Your time is super valuable, especially if you’re juggling all the many tasks of a social media manager by yourself.

Look at what takes you the most time to do. Can you spend a bit of money to make these processes a bit easier?

3. Spend money in such a way that you can make more money to spend

Especially when you’re first starting out, it’s likely that money might be a bit lean. The idea here is that you’d spend your budget on only those activities that could lead directly to your making more money. If you have $100 to spend, it’d be great to have a way to get $100 to spend again the following month.

Your plan

Over to you: How might you spend $100 on social media marketing? 

I’d love to hear your ideas, or maybe even how you’ve spent it in real life, too! Any insights you have would be so great to hear.

Image sources: Pablo, IconFinder, Death to the Stock Photo, 

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