Many companies strive hard to grow their social media followers, but those efforts don't always translate to an increase in revenue. While some businesses embark on a social media strategy with the goal of getting a particular number of followers, it's important to also have a plan for converting those followers into actual customers.

You need to take the people who like your Facebook statuses and retweet your posts on Twitter, and redirect them to your website where you can more effectively capture their information. So how do you create a more intuitive transition between your website and your social media profiles? In this post, I'll show you how a well-crafted landing page can help make your social media profile into a lead-generating machine.

Why Use Social Media at All?

With its murky ROI, social media can seem like more trouble than it's worth as a lead generation tool, especially when you've poured time and effort into refining your company website.

Source: Emarsys

However, these platforms should not be overlooked. While social media is most frequently used to increase brand awareness, it can also be a great source of quality leads. In fact, social media leads can have a higher sales-close ratio compared to leads generated through outbound marketing channels, according to an infographic from Quicksprout. These channels can decrease the time your team needs to spend on marketing, reduce cost and increase revenue. Twenty percent of companies are replacing their email marketing campaigns with social media. This might be too bold of a move for some, because you stand the best chance of successfully marketing to your social media followers when you convert them into email subscribers. Taking a more integrated approach to marketing is one of the best ways to ensure that leads turn into customers. In fact, many companies that use social media have seen an increase in their overall effectiveness and growth in website traffic. The problem with social media is the most popular network is constantly shifting. While Facebook and Twitter reign supreme now, they could be replaced with something else in the near future, because that's the disruptive nature of these platforms. However, if you connect with people through other channels, you don't have to worry about the movements to new networks because you will still have a way to get in touch.

Making a stronger connection between social media and your website

Directing Facebook followers from the network to your website is an essential step because it gives you more control over the experience. On Facebook, you can only manage your own page, but there are built-in features like the navigation bars that can be distracting. Even if users are interested in your product, they may not stay as focused on social media. Sending them to a dedicated landing page can remove the extra noise from the situation, but this isn't a foolproof approach either because people don't always want to be directed away from the social media interface. This move could send them straight for the back button, which contributes to a higher bounce rate. Social media is an excellent way to increase your online presence and raise brand awareness, but in terms of lead generation forms, your website may be better suited for this purpose. In addition, if you're just getting started with social media, it's important to remember that you don't need to build a presence on every available network. For example, if you cater to a business-to-business audience, your target customers most likely don't use Instagram to conduct work-related research. You would probably have better luck with LinkedIn. You need to consider which platforms your customers use the most and establish profiles there. This approach helps you be more successful with one or two networks rather than spreading yourself too thin across all of them.

Source: Emarsys

One of the best ways to establish a strong connection between your social media profiles and your website is to create strong content . Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can also be used to showcase your best blog articles. This content can drive traffic back to your website, but you need to have the right page features in place to capture visitors' contact information so you can get back in touch at a later time.

How to create killer landing pages that keep visitors on your website

Even if visitors are really interested in what you have to say, it can be hard to keep them from going straight back to Facebook or Twitter without providing an email address or other contact information. You need to create compelling calls to action and guide them to the next steps to make the most of your online presence. Here are some tips to create an intuitive flow from your social media profiles to your lead-generation landing pages:

• Be consistent: If your social media posts are filled with playful language and fun contests, visitors will be disoriented if they arrive on your website to find it full of dull, hard-to-understand industry jargon. Other inconsistencies can creep in and derail the effectiveness of your pages. All pages need to have a call to action, especially because not everyone will access your website the same way.
• Calls to action: While we're on the topic of CTAs, you need to be conscious of where you place them. Both social media posts and landing pages need to have them in strategic locations. A/B testing can help you uncover the best placement for CTAs.
• Great content: High-quality content is one of the best ways to get social media followers to visit your site and stay there. Even if you aren't a natural-born writer, what matters most is speaking directly to potential customers' wants and needs. Providing gated resources, such as white papers, e-books and infographics, can give customers a strong incentive to provide contact details in exchange for information they value. Great content also gives social media followers a reason to keep returning to your website.
• Make stronger connections: You can include social sharing buttons on blog posts and other pages when it's appropriate. This provides a more integrated experience, especially when people arrive on your website from social media. If users are truly benefiting from your content, sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn can help you reach more people in their networks.

Take a Hybrid Approach to Social Media Landing Pages

Ultimately, even the best landing pages can be disorienting for social media users who arrive on your website. Facebook and LinkedIn offer on-network landing pages that can act as a transition before directing users to your website. However, these pages can be really distracting because they are situated within the platforms' interfaces. Receiving a notification could be all it takes to send an interested follower back into Facebook. In addition, it's harder to track the effectiveness of these pages without the same kind of analytics you could use on your website. You can improve your landing page’s appeal by acknowledging whichever social network your redirected users came from. Include visual elements that reflect on the social network, such as colors and images, to establish a better sense of consistency and keep users on your page. Depending on your technical capabilities, you can enable login credentials for Facebook, which will generate you leads while also providing an easy sign-in experience for your users. This login feature also makes the visit more seamless for returning followers.

Source: HootSuite

Integrated approaches are becoming more common as marketing moves in an omnichannel direction. Joining your social media efforts with your website can greatly boost your traffic and keep your existing customers engaged and coming back for more business.

About the Author: Juan Pablo Castro is the Community Content Manager at Lander , where he helps manage the company's blog and social profiles. He earned a degree in Public Relations and is a digital marketing and social media maniac.