Using social media calls to action can be instrumental for growing your business. This simple handful of words can increase your online community and boost sales and traffic to your website or blog. When used properly, calls to action fit seamlessly into your posts and lead to your posts being more successful. When used improperly, they can feel clunky, forced, and be a deterrent to your readers and viewers. Luckily, learning to use proper calls to action isn’t difficult and doesn’t take much time. Read on for our tips for using social media calls to action. These tips range from the importance of staying consistent in your use of calls to action and what type of actions you should be calling for, to the wording you should use to be clear and incite action. You could be seeing the effects of good social media calls to action today!
Why You Should Use Social Media Calls to Action
Before you begin to successfully use social media calls to action, it is helpful to fully understand the “why” behind it. What do calls to action do for your online community, and how can they help grow your business? Why work to create powerful social media calls to actions!
Social Media Calls to Action Offer a Next Step
When you create a Facebook post, the bulk of the post is going to be informational. Maybe you’re alerting customers to a new online sale or sharing a great photo of a follower using your product. People will see, like, and possibly even share the post if it is compelling enough. However, even though the information is the bulk of the post, what really clinches the deal is what you want customers and followers to do with this information.
That’s where calls to action come in. Social Media calls to action offer your online community a chance to engage further with your business. When you share a customer-shared image and end the post with a call to action for other followers to share their own photos using your product, you give your online community a next step to further engage with your business. This is how you begin to grow deeper relationships with your online community!
Social Media Calls to Action Boost Business
By offering your online community a next step, you not only further the relationships with them, but you lead them to take actions that will actually grow your business and affect your bottom line. When you post on Facebook about an online sale and provide a call to action with a link inviting people to click the link to shop the sale, you help direct traffic to your online store, which boosts sales. Share an enticing snippet of a new blog post, followed by a call to action inviting your readers to “find out more” and a link to the post, and you drive traffic to your site. Share about an upcoming event happening at your facility, along with a call to action inviting people to RSVP on Facebook or purchase tickets on your website, and you have directed them to take the next step in growing your business by actually showing up to the event in person!
There is a constant supply of information being thrown at people every day on their screens and social media platforms. When you use social media calls to action, you give your online community a chance to step away from the information overload and take a clear action that leads them to something that benefits them (not to mention your business!).
How You Should Use Social Media Calls to Action
Calls to action are helpful for growing your business and your online community, but they aren’t a tool to manipulate your customers. Social Media calls to action shouldn’t be misleading, but rather should be true to the message of your brand and should drive to a destination that lives up to the promise being made in the call to action.
Best Practices for Using Social Media Calls to Action
When you use a call to action, you essentially are making a promise to the customer who takes that action. The line, “Shop the industry’s lowest prices on our webpage by clicking here!” tells the customer that there are indeed great deals and low prices on your site. You will lose not only their interest but also their loyalty if you then lead them to a webpage with jacked-up prices.
Your social media calls to action should be true, and they should also be true to your brand’s voice. They should sound inviting, not forced. We recommend using a call to action in nearly every post, but if you post every day, it can be easy to fall into the rut of saying “Click here” on post after post, making your Facebook feed look formulaic and robotic, rather than genuine and enticing. Use a call to action that fits with the message of the post, and don’t be afraid to switch up the language, as well as the action you are calling people to. It shouldn’t always be a link with a “click here” — rather, invite people to comment with their stories or answer questions, ask people to share your post with a certain hashtag, or embed media and simply ask people to stick around long enough to watch the video below. Your use of calls to action should be trustworthy and consistent, but should vary enough to keep people interested in clicking, sharing, commenting, and more!
How to Format Your Social Media Calls to Action
As we said above, don’t be formulaic to the point of tedium in your calls to action on social media. However, there are some tried and true best practices for formatting and wording your calls to action. For example, it is important to be clear and concise. A good social media call to action should be a short sentence or even sentence fragment, and it should be separated by a line space from the rest of the post, so as not to get lost in the bulk of the text. Within this short sentence, make the words you use pull their weight! We find it works best to have the directive be the last piece of the call to action. For instance, rather than saying “Click to learn more” say “To learn more, click here: [Link]” so as to literally lead right into the action.
You’re trying to drive people to take action, so use action words! This is a place to really let your creativity shine. If you’re asking people to share their answers to a trivia question posed in the post, feel free to stray away from the safe “Comment below,” and instead invite people to “Drop your answers below,” or “Give us your best shot in the comments below!” In a similar vein, try to evoke a sense of urgency in your calls to action. Let people know that they have a limited amount of time to swoop on an online sale, or give them some other reason to think that your website should be the very next website they visit–before they can keep scrolling and forget all about it.
Using calls to action is a simple but effective way to boost your business from your social media! Social Media calls to action offer a next step to your online community, which helps build relationships as well as driving traffic and sales. When you create your social media posts, use clear, concise, and active calls to action that convey a sense of urgency. Be consistent and true to your brand’s voice, and show your online community that your business is worth taking the next step with!
Here at SocialNicole, we are social media experts and part of that expertise is crafting social media posts, including killer calls to action! We’d love to help you use social media to take your business to the next level. Contact us today!
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