Social media has become an important component of digital marketing for any brand with a successful marketing strategy. Though social platforms started out as fun places to hang out with friends, family, and colleagues, they have evolved to become some of the best mediums for building a reputation and boosting brand awareness.

On social media, likes, comments, followers, and shares act as indicators of your business reputation. However, that is not enough as social media can do much more. This explains why businesses are using social media to reach prospects with the sole aim of turning them into buying customers.

Just like in offline marketing, you need a solid strategy to turn prospects into customers. In this instance, prospects are followers. However, since followers do not translate into higher sales, you need to convert the fans who follow your page religiously into buying customers. Here is how to turn social media followers into customers.

Understand your audience

If you intend to get customers from social media, you need to start by identifying your target audience and where they hang out. Here demographics such as age, sex, race, and socio-economic factors come into play. If you are targeting people between the age of 18-30 years, chances are high that your preferred audience is using Instagram and TikTok. On the other hand, if your product or service is aimed at people aged 40, 50, or 60 years and above, concentrating your efforts on TikTok or Snapchat would be futile. Instead, you are more likely to find your audience on Facebook and LinkedIn (the latter is especially true if your offering is business-to-business (“B2B”).

Stay the course

Getting followers is one thing, but keeping them entertained and engaged is a whole new ball game. If you drop the ball in any of those areas, you are likely to lose or put off some of your fans.

Normally, people love consistency. They need to know that they can rely on you day in and day out. Therefore, once you get followers, you must keep them engaged by updating your social media pages consistently with helpful and actionable content. In addition, you need to engage them by responding to all their queries and comments.

Build trust by asking customers to share their user experience

Most prospects gain trust and confidence to buy products or use services after hearing repeat customers share their experiences. This is why businesses go out of their way to ask for reviews – because they know that prospects trust what loyal customers say about a brand, especially compared to ads. To help nudge your fans to buy, ask repeat customers to share their user experience.

Ultimately, while social media is still a platform for people with common interests to hang out, you can make it do double duty by converting followers into paying customers using the above techniques.