Social media engagement can increase sales and revenues. Yes, it’s hard to connect social media engagement metrics (such as likes and shares) to sales, but it’s certainly not impossible.

  • Toy maker Step2 experienced a 130% growth in sales as a result of increased social media activity.
  • KLM, a Dutch airline company, attributed £25 million of its sales one year to social media activity.

Your social media activity can increase sales too, provided that you use the right content and promotion strategies. Here are 7 social media marketing tools that can assist your efforts in this direction.

1. DrumUp for content curation & social media scheduling

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are now unfriendly to “promotional” social media posts. To reach your audience, you need a combination of fresh content, evergreen content and advocates. DrumUp can help you manage all three.

Using DrumUp, first add RSS feeds of your blog and the best news/tips blogs in your industry. Mix posts that appear from these streams into the content you share via social media. Next, add all of your evergreen social posts (mentions, guides, year-round promotions) in folders on DrumUp. Then use DrumUp’s easy scheduling features to create a rich, fresh and effective mix of social media content for your social queues. Finally, add your employees/advocates to DrumUp’s employee advocacy platform and encourage them to share posts in your queues.

2. Rocketium for social media explainer & sales videos

Videos are one of the most popular forms of content shared and consumed on social media platforms today. It’s obvious that to increase reach among your audience, you need video content. Rocketium can help you create videos easily and in less time.

Before you use Rocketium, list the different types of videos that you can create for your target groups. They could be product explainer videos, tips for success, entertaining videos, interview series featuring influencers, etc. Once you have this done, create a schedule for video production and publishing. When it’s time to actually create the videos, try and imagine a mix of stills based videos and rolling footage videos. You can do both with Rocketium. Finally, identify the best video templates on Rocketium for each video, so you can create professional and consistent videos on a regular basis.

3. RelayThat for branded social media graphics

Social media graphics are a critical part of your social media marketing, because they catch more attention than plain text. This fact, however, presents a double-edged sword. If graphics receive more attention, they need to be presentation worthy to have the right effect. RelayThat can help you create branded graphics without any design knowledge.

First, it’s important to identify what content you can represent via graphics. The more diverse your graphics, the more engaged and less bored your audience is likely to be. Once you have a variety of ideas, it’s time to focus on how you’ll design the graphic. On RelayThat, you can choose from a bunch of templates and backdrops. Choose the one that makes most sense and upload your images into it. RelayThat also allows you to store your logo, font and colors. Once you have, you can simply add those settings to all of your graphics, ensuring a consistency that’s otherwise a pain to maintain.

4. IFTTT for strategic cross-publishing & lead generation

If you don’t have the time to create separate content for each of your social media accounts, you should consider using a cross-publishing app to share across platforms. With IFTTT, you can do this and more.

The people who engage with your content on social media are expressing interest in that niche and in your company. That’s why such people make great leads. However, it’s tricky identifying and making a note of all of such leads, unless you have an app to do it for you. IFTTT has recipes that you can use to automatically store info about people who have engaged with your content on Sheets or email. The tool also lets you automatically publish Twitter statuses to LinkedIn or Facebook, etc. It makes most sense to experiment with different recipes and run the ones that best suit your brand and business.

5. Socedo for social media prospecting & lead generation

Lead generation via social media is an excellent idea, especially because you can learn so much about your target audience via what they share on social media platforms. Socedo can help you identify potential targets from within your social media community.

Before you get to using Socedo, it’s important to be sure that you have built the most relevant social media following. If all of your followers are software developers and you’re targeting marketers, the engagement on your social media accounts probably mean nothing. One simple way to build a relevant social media following is by referring to the people who follow pages similar to yours. Regardless, you can use Socedo to find potential leads based on important industry keywords.

6. Twitter lists for influencer marketing & advocacy

Relationship building is critical when pursuing employee advocacy. Unless you have a preexisting relationship with influencers, you can’t expect them to want to drop everything and work with you. Twitter lists are great for relationship building on Twitter.

When creating Twitter lists, it is useful to have specific goals in mind. Why are you creating each list that you’re creating? What’s each list’s purpose and whom do you intend to add to the list? Based on the answers to those questions, decide whether you want to create a Private or Public list. Once you’ve created the lists, you can start adding people to them, but ensure that you don’t add too many people so the list doesn’t end up too cluttered. Create a schedule to follow and engage with people on your lists.

7. TweetChat for targeted conversations & conversions

Twitter is a great place for conversations that can lead to either lead generation or direct sales. You can also find the right conversations for PR and advocacy. TweetChat can help you find such conversations.

Hashtags act as great conversation identifiers on Twitter. You simply need to know which hashtags to follow. One way to do that is by typing in the hashtags you know on Twitter and exploring the ones that Twitter suggests. Use TweetChat to find conversations using hashtags related to your industry to get some visibility. Alternatively, you can also follow Twitter chat hashtags to catch the relevant people when your visibility can increase hundredfold or more.

Wrap

Social media engagement can mean so much more than marketers give it credit for. What you need is the right set of tools and social media marketing strategies to achieve the results that you want.

Read more: Creating Engagement With New Audio and Video Tools