Social media marketing enables you to attract more attention when you create and share content. Social media platforms are great places to engage with your audience but they aren’t the best places to make sales. To make sales, you want to use social media to drive traffic to your opt-ins, in order to build your list. Your email list provides the best and easiest opportunities to make sales.

Start with a Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is often referred to as an ethical bribe, but today lead magnets are much more than that. They’re valuable content that your audience can use right now to solve a problem. They can help you grow your list by offering multiple ways for your audience to enter your list by downloading gated content. The gated content requires an email address to get it, which in turn puts them on your email list into a segment based on what they downloaded.

A good lead magnet:

• Solves a Specific Problem
• Works Quickly
• Provides Immediate Gratification

They can be in multiple forms including:

• eBooks
• Infographics
• Slideshows
• Quizzes
• Apps
• Checklists
• Cheat Sheets
• Reports
• Videos
• Webinars

Practically speaking, anything that truly is helpful to your audience can be turned into a lead magnet. You can present the lead magnet in many ways using social media. Let’s look at some ways to use social media to build your list with a lead magnet.

Ways to Use Lead Magnets to Build Your List on Social Media

There are numerous ways you can use social media to grow your list with a captivated audience who will stay on your list, tell others about your list, and buy your offers and even become long-term customers and fans of your products and services.

Promote Your Lead Magnets Regularly

When you create a lead magnet, don’t just wait for people to show up on your blog or website to grab the lead magnet. Instead, promote it like you would any product you’ve created by spreading the word on social media. Use the scheduling functions or software like Hootsuite.com to help you share each lead magnet more than once.

Lead magnets, for the most part, should be evergreen options. While they can motivate people to join your list, they can also be used to segment a list. Segmenting your list effectively means you don’t have to worry so much about freebie seekers. Using tags to move people through your list funnel helps you deliver just the right information to the segment, creating a healthy email list environment and experience.

Add a CTA to All Social Media Profiles

Most of your social media profiles allow for some form of link or HTML or even a button. Create a call to action that leads to an opt-in page with a freebie for each social media platform that you use. Don’t use the same landing page for every social media platform. Each audience is slightly different and should be treated as unique. Plus, remember the more options you have for your audience the more likely they are to get on your list and stay on your list.

Use Content Upgrades in Blog Posts & Promote on Social Media

When you create a new blog post, always add at least one content upgrade which is an in-content link to an opt-in of some sort. It may be a checklist, a more in-depth report, or anything that is easily downloadable and relevant to the content they’re reading that provides more information for them. It’s a great way to prove your expertise on a topic and it grabs their attention while they’re already reading about the topic so the likelihood of someone signing up for your list to get that additional content is high.

Add a Call-To-Action Button to Your Facebook Page

Set up a Facebook Page. Keep it active and add a sign-up button. In your scheduled posts, add a reminder to sign up for your list via your sign-up button. To add the sign-up button, you just “edit” the button and add the link to your sign-up form. It’s that easy. If that doesn’t work to get more signups, consider adding a “learn more” link with your opt-in form and freebie.

Host a Contest & Giveaway

A fun way to build your list on social media is to host a contest and/or a giveaway. A giveaway involves giving away something free of value to your audience and to anyone who signs up. To host a giveaway on social media it should be big and valuable to get enough buzz. One way to do that is to have a contest instead. Everyone who enters the contest gets signed up, but only some will get the big prize. Be careful with what you give away. You want the giveaway to be something valuable only to your main audience and not attractive to just anyone. Although, if you tie it up into a contest that requires the entrants to do something sometimes that can work fine even if the prize is money.

Enable Sharing of Your Email Messages

Most email marketing software has a feature in it that allows those who received the email to share it with a click to their social media, or their friends. While most people can “forward” a message they receive in email, enabling social sharing will let them share it with a click to their social media and since so many people frown on forwarding messages from email they’re more likely to do it this way to help you get the word out.

Pay for Promotion and Ads on Social Media

Most social media today including Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook allow some form of promotion. In fact, if they offer it, you practically must do it because that’s the only way to get more eyes on your offers. Thankfully, it’s easy and inexpensive to set up. You’re likely to get a lot of signups if you promote something your audience feels is valuable to their success.

Share Everything on Social Media

When you create anything, it should be shared on social media. Whether it’s a blog post, a product, a freebie, a new opt-in, and even in some cases an important email that you’ve sent to your subscribers – it should be shared on social media. The more eyes you can get on any piece of content that you’ve created the better and the more likely you are to get sign-ups. Don’t just share things one-time either. Share regularly and repeatedly. You can use software like Hootsuite.com, Tailwind.com, or Missinglettr.com to help you schedule repeat shares.

Host Twitter Chats

Live chats are a great way to get sign-ups. Twitter has technology that allows you to add “cards” to your account. You can add summary cards with an image or without. Photo cards, Gallery card, Product cards, App cards, and Player cards for gamers. If you run ads with Twitter, you’ll get access to two more cards, Lead Generation cards and Website cards. You can use WordPress Plugins such as JM Twitter Cards or Facebook Open Graph Google+ and Twitter Card Tags to set up Twitter cards on your site. With cards, you’ll get more traffic. If you host a Twitter Chat, you can use that to build your list. When someone shares your content, your card will appear and they’ll be able to find you.

Go Live on Facebook, Instagram & YouTube

Using live events on social media is a good way to get more traffic to your social media platforms. When you get more views on the social media platform, such as your Facebook Page, more eyes can see your profile, your story, and your sign-up forms. Plus, during the live event, you can point out the opt-in and ask them to go get the freebie that you’re offering them that relates to what you’re talking about on the live event.

All of these things work great on social media to build your list fast. Growing your email list will seem almost automatic. As you create more lead magnets, content upgrades, and other freebies for your audience, there will be more points of entry for them to get on your list. However, you need to create special landing pages for each of your lead magnets and for each platform that’s sending you traffic.

Create Special Opt-in Pages (landing pages)

Everything talked about here is an effective way to grow your email list using social media but the most important aspect of this is the opt-in pages or landing pages. The more landing pages you have the more ways in which you get more people to subscribe to your email list. Your opt-in landing page doesn’t have to be long and complicated, but it should be specific to the opt-in you’re offering, and to where the traffic is originating.

Each landing page needs these elements:

• Your Headline – This should be short and sweet and to the point. Describe a specific benefit to the audience member. You can also ask a question (that you’ll answer), make a promise, poke the problem, or explain that you’ll guide them to success.

• A Sub Headline – Since headlines must be short, you’ll want a sub-headline that explains the details further. For example, the headline might say, “Lost Your Keys Again?” to poke the bear about the problem of disorganization. The sub-headline can be longer and say something like Get Your Home Organized in Just 10 Minutes a Day.

• Landing Page Copy – This can be long or short but it should be based on your knowledge of the audience and the niche. It needs to introduce the problem, offer a solution, show how the solution solves the problem, explain the benefits of the solution, and tell why it’s the best option for their needs.

• Opt-in Form – Your form is very important because you want it to be very clear what they must input to get the lead magnet. Studies show that the less information you ask for the better. Keep in mind if you use personalization in your email messages you’ll want to collect their name and email at a minimum. You can always collect more information later.

• Social Proof – Mostly you want to show them that you’re trustworthy and that other people have received your information and prospered in some way from it. If you have a large list, you can say something like “more than 100,000 people agree” or you can even put a short testimonial if you have it. Alternatively, if you’ve been around a long time you can use that as proof. “More than 22 years’ experience” or something like that.

• The Lead Magnet or Offer – You need to include an offer of some type in the landing page and they should have no doubt from the copy about what they’re going to receive. Your lead magnet should solve one problem quickly and provide longer-term benefits once the solution is fully implemented. You don’t want them to have to wait to get the lead magnet. Technology helps you with prompt delivery and downloads. Leadpages.net and a lot of email marketing software like Drip.com offer the ability to let them get their download instantly, without a double opt-in.

• Your CTA – Don’t assume that if someone goes to your landing page, reads all the copy on it, and sees clearly that they can get your freebie that they’re going to do it if you don’t tell them to do it. You can include the CTA on the form, and/or within the copy on your landing page. Think outside the box for good CTAs. Instead of “download now” (yawn) try for something more exciting such as, “Heck Yeah, I’m In. Give It To Me Now!” or something like that.

Creating the right landing page for your opt-ins accomplishes several things. It ensures that your audience knows what they’re getting. It also shows how you pay attention to detail whether it’s a free offer or a paid offer.

If your work is the same whether free or not it will help you build a good reputation as an expert in your niche and an authority in your field. This is an area where having high standards pays off.

Using social media to promote your landing pages, opt-ins and build your list is more effective than almost any other way of building your email list. It can create amazing buzz for your brand at the same time you’re building your list with people who are ready to buy what you’re selling.