sold-street-artSocial Media has become a key component to the success of many businesses.  Contextual Advertising, real-time word-of-mouth sharing and positive reviews help generate lots of traffic.  If you can’t turn that traffic into sales or leads, then the traffic is wasted. Knowing how to collect and use the data generated can be difficult if you don’t have the best tools. After all, you wouldn’t use a screwdriver to get a nail into a wall.

According to 5 Trends That Will Change How Companies Use Social Media, nine out of ten businesses are active on social media and 80% have a dedicated social media team. Yet, for many conversions remain lower than other channels.

Here are a few favorites tools to help turn social media visitors into customers:

Raventools – Raventools is powerful because it makes it easy to track all your key social media campaign metrics. Without great metrics, you can’t know what is or is not working.

Conversion Tip: Success in social media comes from being able to react to the analytics in near real-time. Raventools’ Social Media Dashboards (plus other dashboards) make it easy for you to get campaign and profile data. Even right at your fingertips.

Screenshot of www.raventools.com

AddShoppers – A Social Sharing Platform which uses Reward sharing. It identifies Influencers and tracks social activity including, ROI. Their AddSocial solution includes:

Sharing Buttons – Sharing buttons used to drive more revenue and grab more leads. It also integrates Influencer marketing campaigns.

Trending Wall – Using a Pinterest-style layout, the Trending Wall highlights popular content. This helps to keep customers engaged on your site longer and increase order value.

Social Login – A great solution for filling out forms, even on mobile. This will improve data accuracy and enrich customer records with more data.

Purchase Sharing – Prompting your customers to talk about their purchase, when they are happy. This will increase your “word-of-mouth” traffic. About 30% of a sites sharing activity happens immediately after a sale.

Conversion Tip: Social Rewards, Referral Incentives and Targeted Ads help increase conversions. Imagine a customer NOT having to leave your site to look for coupons. They just have to share their purchase and receive a discount. Or, if they refer a friend, they can both receive discounts. Happy customers lead to higher sales, and that is the goal.

Screenshot of www.addshoppers.com

Fan Machine – A Suite to manage your social marketing. The platform integrates Ads and Insights capabilities.

Publisher – Helps increase your reach and simplify publishing tasks. It includes post creation, promotion and comment moderation.

Builder – Increase engagement with entertaining and viral campaigns. Its as simple as creating a Facebook event and is functionable on mobile.

Amplifier – A Facebook Ads optimizer which creates different types of ads. It also assigns more budget to the ones that perform better.

Insights – Detects your impact using metrics of your pages, campaigns and tags. Get a better understanding of what works better and what impacts your customer and fan base.

Social CRM – Find out what your target needs and analyse their likes and preferences. Then you will be able to offer the best opportunities to increase sales.

Conversion Tip: The Fan Machine helps increase Social Conversion by collecting the right data. This helps you get to know your customers better and allows you to continue keeping them happy.  We love the speed (you will too) at which these things are built. This is powerful for social media conversion optimization.

Screenshot of www.thefanmachine.com

Ilos Videos – A screen recording platform that makes screencasting a breeze. From recording to uploading to conversion, Ilos can get it all done.

Record – Built for ease of use, the recorder will launch right from your browser or desktop app. The files are kept small, no matter the length of the video. This makes them able to be viewed anywhere and there is an undo feature so mistakes are not a problem.

Share – With integrated Cloud Storage, sharing becomes easy by grabbing the link. You can even manage who can access the video.

Store – Ilos offers unlimited Cloud Storage so you don’t have to fill up your computer.  You will still have access whenever you need it. Playlists help make managing easy and you can even upload old videos.

Edit –  As soon as you complete recording, the video gets uploaded to an edit page.  Here you can re-record, trim unwanted parts and even add background music. You can also blur out private information that might be in the screening.

Conversion Tip: According to a study (published by Cisco in the Washington Post), in five years, 80% of the world’s Internet consumption will be through video. Being able to easily capture the right  video and how and where to use it will make all the difference in the world. Having an agile tool to create videos will allow you to create lots of different videos and see which ones impact sales the fastest.

Screenshot of www.ilosvideos.com

Sightly – Programmatic targeting of customers with personalized videos.

Ad Personalization – The process of creating different versions of an ad for different audiences. This helps boost response rates by 200%. You can test which commercials, spokespersons, products, features, etc. appeal to the most viewers.

Micro-Targeted Delivery – Reach the right viewers most cost-effectively. Micro-Targeting produces abundant data about audience micro-segments and delivery channels. This helps you make the best marketing decisions.

Campaign Automation – Makes the processes required to launch and run video advertising campaigns easier. You can deliver powerful, personalized video messages across all screens.

Intelligent Optimization – This engine uses algorithms and data analytics to help optimize ads, offers, audiences and spends.

Conversion Tip:

Relevant ads drive traffic and help boost conversions. Sightly makes sure you are providing relevant ads. Using their analyses and data collection, they localize and personalize your video ads.  You can be sure you are hitting the customers you want.

Screenshot of www.sightly.com

What Would Seth Godin Do Plug-In – This WordPress Plug-in allows you to add a custom message to your post. This helps differentiate between first time visitors and repeat visitors. It will help you learn what message gets the first time visitor to convert. Oftentimes, it is different than what makes a repeat visitor become a customer and/or subscriber.

Conversion Tip: Test different offers, get a free White Paper, ask them to subscribe or share, try different messages for new and repeat visitors and see whether the message is in the header or footer of the post to see which is most effective.

Screenshot of wordpress.org

PIPL’s FileApp – Upload a file with whatever pieces of information you have about your prospects or customers, and PIPL will complete your data inside the spreadsheet. If you have an email address, it will find a social media profile and vice versa including name, address, email, phone, etc.

Conversion Tip: The old direct marketing mantra of “the money is in the list” can now be updated with “the money is in the data from the list”. The more you know about your customers, where they are, where they interact, etc, the more you can appeal to their wants and needs.

Screenshot of pipl.com

Facebook – Among all the great new lead generation and other ad units that Facebook has been offering, the ability to use FB to test which headlines and images will be the most valuable in your social media campaigns will be powerful.

Conversion Tip: The way to do this is to set up two similar posts but slightly change the headline or change the image. Send each of the posts to separate audiences to see which has the best response. Then use the better ad to share in all your other organic and paid campaigns. Check out this great guide from Buffer on how to write better and test headlines on Social Media. You might also want to use a tool like Canva, Shutterstock Editor or Visme to create your graphics.

Screenshot of www.facebook.com

UserTesting.com – Providing a poor experience on a website or app can cost companies millions of dollars. By being able to see what customers do and how they interact on your site, you are better able to understand what might be causing them not to be able to complete the desired action, buying or registering. From simply choosing the wrong wording to using the wrong type of picture, potential customers might be missing the link they need, and you want them, to click.

Conversion Tip: Pick three previous campaigns you have run, and watch how actual people interact with your social media campaigns and through your website as they talk out loud about their experience. You will get plenty of ideas on what you can do to improve future campaigns.

Screenshot of www.usertesting.com

Buffer – In Social Media, you need to be able to catch people in the moment, the right moment. With Buffer, you can stack, and schedule, your posts to whichever platform you choose. The posts can be the same for all platforms or customized as you wish. Buffer will also repeat posts at planned times.

Conversion Tip: Social Media is not just post once and forget it. If you have an effective campaign, don’t neglect to share it multiple occasions over multiple channels over time. Unless, of course, your campaign is time sensitive, like a Holiday Sale.

Screenshot of buffer.com

Buzzsumo – Helps create high converting content. You can search Buzzsumo to analyse the best performing content and influencers for any topic. You will learn what content is hot at the moment, but also what platforms to use and see where and how it is best shared and by whom.

Conversion Tip: Great social media campaigns don’t happen by accident, even if you have the right ingredients. if you can find the right influencers to share your content, it is like adding gasoline to the fire.

Screenshot of buzzsumo.com

A similar product I am evaluating now is ninjaoutreach.com.

In the social media and conversion world, everyone can influence someone. So, won’t you please share this article? Also, if you have any tools you would like to share with us, please drop us a note.

Please share if you think others would benefit.