So, you’ve painstakingly built your social media presence on one or more channels. Now what do you do?
Maybe you’re a brand that has successfully grown their following, or a creative individual who has “accidentally” amassed followers. Either way, it’s time to get a plan in place to take advantage of your social media following.
The main thing to do…
Creating and selling products
The most obvious way to monetise your page is to sell products through your following, but remember, not every follower will be “in-market” to buy whatever you’re selling. Plus, if your page is random (like with many popular social media pages), you’ll need to find a point of interest through audience analysis. You don’t want to sell everything - the beauty is building your product list up the more you sell. Start small if you’re an individual, and if you’re a brand, start big but use audience insights at the centre of everything you do.
Page collaborations
Just because you’ve built a big following doesn’t mean you want to invest time creating and selling products. And that’s fine. Although it can be easy through print-on-demand sites, there is an even simpler way of making money - through selling other people’s products. Your audience could be made up of specific demographics that businesses will want to advertise to.
The great thing is that channels are now making it easier to collaborate with other pages and brands, which is aiding influencer work. You could collaborate with other accounts similar to yours by simply contacting them. Remember though, whatever posts you create should be in line with your page, otherwise you could lose followers.
Growing to sell the page
Like buying domain names, who’s to say someone won’t want to buy your social page? If you joined Facebook in the early days when anyone could create a page, you’ll notice how some of those pages have been renamed over the years. That’s because they’ve amassed huge social followings accidentally, and someone has been willing to buy it to communicate to a ready-made, engaged audience. There are even websites that allow you to buy and sell Facebook pages, although none of these we’ve used. The tip? Keep growing the following – it may be worth the investment.
Make money through website traffic
Depending on how engaged your audience are, you could make money by running ads on a website created for your social media page. You’ll need to generate high monthly website visits, and it’ll be beneficial to provide demographic data that will help sell your advertising space to businesses. In theory, if your audience are engaged with your social page, why wouldn’t they read related content on a website?
With followers, you need to remember that they’re more than just a number; they’re people, and you need to engage them.
Engagement is how you can prove your page’s worth and maybe even charge higher margins.
Want to find out about how savvy we are with social? Read some of our case studies.