Entry requires that the visitor retweet the message and a link back to the landing page creating the viral effect

1. Create a landing page offering a contest prize suitable for your target market
2. Add Facebook & Twitter widgets to facilitate sharing
3. Add a simple one field email collection form
4. The viral part: Require that entrants use your selected social sharing devices in order to enter the contest
5. Specify that email is required to notify the winner
6. Do a random draw to determine your winner(s)
7. Notify winners via your new email list and include an extra promotional offer

An example

Our latest contest is to give away a free $600 conference pass to the Landing Page Success Seminar. Check it out (and enter if you like) and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Which Social Widgets Should You Use?

In the example above I used two widgets:

• Facebook Like Box: This allows you to acquire new fans for your Facebook page. The widget in question also provides an element of social proof by showing your fan count and some photos of your fans. You can customize this widget and grab the embeddable code for it from the Facebook share section.
• Twitter “Tweet This” Box: This is the widget that can make your contest viral. It requires that you set up a Twitter @Anywhere app (instructions for how to do it with Unbounce here). Now as part of the contest entry, people retweet your message and a link back to the contest page, driving more traffic to your contest and extending your reach.

Simple and effective. Give it a try.

A little about the online conference from the landing page

The conference pass we’re giving away on the example landing page is for the Landing Page Success Seminar.

Enter to win a $600 online conference pass

The Landing Page Success Seminar is going to be a great place to be if you’re into using landing pages and improving your conversion rate. The list of speakers is incredible. Here’s a quick highlight of who’s running a workshop:

• Bryan Eisenberg: is a professional marketing speaker and best selling author.
• Chris Goward: is the CEO of Wider Funnel, a company specializing in conversion rate optimization.
• Trevor Claiborne: is the Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics & Website Optimizer.
• Scott Brinker: is the co-founder, president and CTO of Ion Interactive, a kick-ass enterprise landing page solution.
• Jim Sterne: is an international speaker and conversion metrics expert.
• Brian Clark: runs the awesome blog Copyblogger which has a great section on landing pages.
• Anna Talerico: is the executive vice president of Ion Interactive.
• Lance Loveday: is the CEO of Closed Loop Marketing.
• David Cancel: is the CEO of Performable, an analytics startup.
• Ben Jesson: is the CEO of UK optimizers Conversion Rate Experts.
• Connie Stack: is a marketing entrepreneur from WordStream.
• Bill Leake: is the CEO of Apogee Results.
• Raquel Hirsch: is a conversion optimization expert and co-founder of Wider Funnel.
• Brian Massey: is the Conversion Scientist and wears a white lab coat!
• Noran El-Shinnawy: is an Internet Marketing Manager at Acquisio.
• Kipp Bodnar: leads HubSpot’s content marketing team.
• Byron White: is the founder and Chief Idea Officer of ideaLaunch, a content marketing agency.

Unbounce CEO Rick Perreault and I will also be running a workshop at the start of the conference.

Enter to win a $600 online conference pass

– Oli Gardner

The concept of a lead is normally associated with an email address, but that’s only one way of seeing it. Having a potential business target within your social sphere of influence is another way to extend your reach and build your inbound marketing program.

How To: Find relevant people to follow and engage with on Twitter

This is a simple technique that you can use to make the search for relevant people a little more painless. In 3 simple steps you can uncover a wealth of interesting, and more importantly, relevant people to place in your business lead in-tray.

1. Step 1: Play with Twitter search to uncover some relevant hashtags for your target market. For me that would include things like #landingpages #PPC #conversions #lpo #cro #crochat #seochat. These are your sources.
2. Step 2: Open a new browser tab for each hashtag and enter it into the search box. This will bring up a live stream of people interested in that topic. If you leave them for a few minutes you’ll notice that the browser tab title updates with a live count (in brackets) of how many new tweets there are on this subject.
3. Step 3: Leave these tabs open all day (or for as long as you care to engage with your Twitter network) and every hour or so – dependent on how fast the unread list grows – look down the recent tweets and follow the people discussing or sharing info on your topic of choice.

By doing this you’ll be able to build your potential list of business leads while keeping right on top of the latest discussions, buzz and links happening in your space.

Easy as pie.

– Oli Gardner

Conversion Heroes

Conversion Heroes is a series of 5-question interviews with experts in the field of conversion. Subjects for discussion include landing pages, copywriting, conversion optimization, social media conversion, email marketing, organic SEO for landing pages and A/B & multivariate testing.

Welcome to the Conversion Heroes interview series Dan, and thanks for taking part. We’ll kick things off with a common perception amongst marketers – that social media marketing is free marketing.

1. Is social media marketing really free?

Oli: People also say that social media marketing (SMM) doesn’t convert very well, but that this is okay because of the free marketing factor. What do you think? Is SMM really free?

Dan: I like to say that social media is free like a puppy. If somebody gave me a puppy, yeah, it would be free, but it would also require a lot of my time. A lot of people say that about social and open source and unless you consider your time worthless, it does have a cost.

Oli: How do you deal with the cost factor? Is it just something you squeeze in as part of your daily routine or do you set aside time and a budget for it?

Dan: The first thing you need to do is figure out what your goal is. I’ve always said, if you’re better at doing video than at writing a blog then you should stick to one format until you get traction on that, then decide if you want to branch out to the others. Start with strategy first – what your goal is with regard to the content and the type of engagements that you want to have. If you want to tweet, if you want to blog, if you want to do YouTube videos or maintain a Facebook fan page, you’ve got to decide which to use, and I would say less is more.

Once you’ve figured that out, try to understand the problem that your company is solving for your customer, find or create content that’s relevant to them and test that format and see if it resonates with people. At the end of the day it’s not necessarily about generating revenue directly correlated to your social media activities but it is about creating relevant engagement with your ideal customer type. So the last thing you want is to be a small coffee shop and talking about interior decorating as you’ll attract the wrong type of follower.

Oli: So you’re saying don’t spread yourself too thinly? Don’t try and jump into every social media channel?

Dan: Exactly. Do the one that you know you’re actually going to do. It’s just like being active. Some people like to go to the gym. Some people like to run. Other people like to bike. Figure out which activity you’re going to do and you’re going to be able to keep doing. Having an inactive social media account is worse than not having one. It’s negative social proof to have a twitter account that hasn’t been updated in a year, or that isn’t being followed – it reflects badly on the business.

Oli: What kind of effect does a dormant social media account have?

Dan: I do believe you should claim it and then maybe just have a post that says “right now we’re really busy servicing our customers but at some point we’d like to start engaging using this medium. Check back.” right? To have ten updates and then no updates for six months is bad ‘cause it makes you look like you’re a starter and not a finisher – a bad perception to have in business.

It’s negative social proof to have a twitter account that hasn’t been updated in a year, or that isn’t being followed – it reflects badly on the business.

Oli: How valuable is content in establishing the conversations you have in the social media?

Dan: Everyone knows in business that cash is king. In the social world, content is king and you don’t necessarily have to be the creator, being a curator is also valuable. Being the thought leader, establishing yourself as a resource or a reference for the problem that your company solves is the reason you make social media work, with regard to generating a real return on investment on your time.

There’s actually a term I’ve heard a while ago called ROA (Return On Attention) and I think that’s a great way of figuring out how to add value. Essentially, you want to provide a high ROA for your followers and fans.

2. Social media marketing campaigns

Oli: Measurability is a big deal in online marketing, and the concept of a “campaign” can help when it comes to success or failure metrics. What goes into planning a social media campaign? Do you treat social media as its own campaign channel or is it just one of the many pieces that you’re throwing out there?

Dan: Well I think there are two types of social media activities. There’s event or campaign based which would be for something like a contest or press release etc. and then there’s the stuff that you do on an ongoing basis like a blog, your Twitter stream, your Facebook fan page and those are essentially channels that you’re building. The beauty of social is that it disintermediates the owner of the marketing channel to your customer.

So today in traditional marketing, the newspaper owns the channel right? With something like email, whoever owns that subscriber list (obviously permission based) owns that channel. But with social media you can essentially start creating your own channel. This is something that you want to do over time. So on the campaign side I would say that social helps amplify a good message. We use traditional press as well as real world events and then utilize our social channels to amplify that.

Oli: What do you set as your conversion goals for a campaign like that?

Dan: For me it’s not about direct conversions. Social media is still one of the least performing in regards to direct conversions tied to some kind of financial ROI. We know today how our blog converts to sign ups. We know how many people come from twitter that sign up for a product.

Even if you’re exclusively doing social media marketing – which is based on your time, put a dollar value to your time and say, okay it’s going to take me two weeks to run this photo contest and I think that we should be able to get x submissions and each submission should get a hundred views and out of those hundred views 5% should convert.

The beauty of social is that it disintermediates the owner of the marketing channel to your customer.

If you know that your website converts at 30% to sign up and I think I should be able to convert 5% of social traffic to paid or whatever it is, then just from sitting down and doing the math it would let you decide if two weeks is way too expensive to do this campaign based on the numbers. I’m a big metrics guy and I like to run through some numbers every time – typically using a piece of paper and pen.

Oli: What tools do you use to measure social conversions?

Dan: Initially we used Google. If I had to do it again today I would highly recommend that small business owners use a tool called Swix. I like the fact that they’re simple and let you track all your social accounts with analytics in regard to views and followers. If you’re a company like ours that have a freemium model or even a hosted SaaS application I would highly recommend KISSmetrics because they allow you to track real people (at the individual level) and users through your funnel and figure out where they’re dropping off and not converting, on a per channel basis.

You just add a little query string to tell it a visitor came from Twitter or your other social profiles and then you can track them from click-through to your site, into your product funnel, and then figure out which channels are converting the best to paid customers.

Oli: That is really cool, the personal aspect is essential and something that’s been missing from analytics for a long time.

Dan: Yeah, as Eric Ries says “metrics are people too”, and understanding people as individuals and not like some number on a graph is very important.

3. Improving Social Media Conversions

Oli: There’s not much point in metrics if you don’t react to them. How do you learn from what you’ve done in the past to become more effective via your social media messaging?

Dan: We use a tool called awe.sm, for URL shortening when sharing our content on our Twitter stream and even sometimes within email content. Awe.sm lets you track the sharing activities through different social networks. So somebody shared content from my blog to their Facebook feed, versus from my blog through Twitter, versus the same piece of content I shared on Facebook but then somebody took that and shared it on Twitter. It’s really complex but it shows you which content is resonating with your audience and which gets the furthest reach. And then once I understand what’s working, I try to figure out how can I create other content that is similar.

… it changed the game for SEO as now you need to understand how Google is classifying content within the real time feeds.

Oli: How has your social media strategy changed compared to when you were starting out?

Dan: There are so more many disciplines to learn now. I wasn’t an SEO guy before, but once Google started licensing the Twitter feed including social organic – or social results in the organic results – it changed the game for SEO as now you need to understand how Google is classifying content within the real time feeds. So I would say that initially we were doing a few things well, a few things really well, and a few things kind of amateur, now we’re are a lot more refined.

Our Facebook fan page is my primary focus right now and our engagement and usage has grown by 287% month over month because I started focusing on it and trying to understand and learn from the best.

And here’s a tip. If you want to be amazing, go find people that are currently doing amazing stuff and borrow their ideas. I found the top ten Facebook fan pages, looked at the kind of content and interactions they were having with their customers and thought “How can I create content similar to these concepts? How do they format their status updates? What questions are they asking their community? How often were they engaging with them? How frequent are they posting content?”

Then I used that to drive my strategy.

If all you do is ask questions, you can fatigue your fans…

Oli: Right. So emulating what’s working rather than reinventing the wheel.

Oli: What do you find creates the most engagement? Is it asking questions or is it based on the style in which you communicate?

Dan: The thing that we’ve noticed is that if all you do is ask questions, you can fatigue your fans. We made this mistake where we said “Hey, what do you think?”, then we’d share some content. Or “Do you like this?” At the end of the day people just didn’t like it. So I will give a tip to your readers. Something we discovered was those conversation starters – the little cards that you can buy for your house and put on your coffee table – and when you have people over you can pull one out and you ask them a question based on the conversation starters.

Think about that. They are amazing questions to be asking on your fan page. Relevant to your industry. So for us it’s social engagement, people and relationships. We did a couple of those tests and got the best conversions and engagement that we’ve ever had.

So now we sprinkle that into our Facebook strategy.

Oli: That’s a great tip.

You have to be remarkable. Remarkable meaning that people will remark on what you’re doing

Dan: What are the things that people comment on? Obviously you have to have a strong opinion right? You have to be remarkable. Remarkable meaning that people will remark on what you’re doing. Seth Godin calls it the purple cow. You have different types of audience within your customer base. Some people might like your content to be more visual. Make sure you have a compelling image in some of your posts. Some people read status updates. Make sure your status updates are good.

My favorite social media tool is to use a question with a fill in the blank. People will answer that question. It’s what people do in the real world and the pattern applies to social channels.

Go check out a photo on our Facebook fan page and you’ll see that is what we’re doing, and if you feel like that will work for your audience, borrow from us. We don’t mind.

4. Enhancing landing page performance using social media

Oli: Let’s switch on to the idea of landing pages and social media. Landing pages are a proven way to improve the conversion rate of your inbound traffic. How can you leverage social media on a landing page to increase engagement from your social media traffic?

Dan: Yeah, the big idea you need to understand is a thing called social proof. I first learned about it from real estate marketers that used to hire actors to be in a room when they were explaining and selling condo units. When they opened up the doors to presell these condo units, four or five actors would jump out of their seats and run to the four or five tables that were available, essentially demonstrating to the other participants in the room that wow there is an interest and if I don’t hurry up I may not be in on this opportunity.

So that’s the concept of social proof. I don’t agree with that particular tactic, but it worked.

If I go to a landing page or website and it shows me their Twitter account with 14,000 followers, that is one indication that this person is high quality, they’re saying things that people care about. Or if I go to a landing page and it has a Facebook comment widget and I see people that I know commenting and giving praise to this company, that is huge. That’s social proof.

The same thing applies on your blog. One thing that we focus on as a metric is how many comments do we get per post? Because at the end of the day there is only one or two percent of people online that will actually create content or comment on things. So those people are unique and you want to make sure that you’re writing content that engages them.

Every time somebody says something nice on their Twitter account, just star the mention and it automatically updates on their website. It keeps it fresh and interesting and new.

Oli: So it’s essentially a more modern version of the testimonial.

Dan: Absolutely. And a tactic I’ve seen startup companies use, is as people say nice things about them on Twitter, which is by default public and available for anybody to re-purpose, they star it and then they use a feed to show the starred comments on their homepage, cycling through. So every time somebody says something nice on their Twitter account, just star the mention and it automatically updates on their website (using some simple scripts). It keeps it fresh and interesting and new.

Oli: Yeah, that’s a great technique. What’s your take on etiquette here? With regards to asking permission to show the comments?

Dan: I personally think asking is the right thing to do. You can just DM the person and say “Hey do you mind if I use that and put it in our homepage?” Most people will be honored. Some people might say no. At the end of the day though it’s up to you. If their account is public I think it’s fair game to show what they created if it’s an RSS feed. That’s the key as there are certain kinds of etiquette around syndication that make it acceptable.

Oli: Yeah I guess it’s a little different when you have a flow of information like that rather than just taking someones words and hard coding them into your page.

Dan: Exactly. And as long as you don’t mislabel it. As long as you use a label like “things people are saying about us on twitter” that is cool. If you show what your users are saying without the reference to their tweet it’s misleading. You need to frame the context of their message.

5. Leveraging social profiles

Oli: Let’s end on how to leverage social profiles in your marketing. Can you talk a little bit about Flowtown and what it offer marketers in social media?

Dan: So Flowtown solves the problems every small business faces when they choose to use social media as a marketing channel. These are where are my customers? once I join a network what do I say and who do I talk to? and then what impact is any of this having?

Today if you import your customers into Flowtown we’ll show you a breakdown of what social networks they’re on. Next you can see who’s influential within your existing customer base and plan 1-on-1 outreach with the people who have the potential to be your biggest advocates, next you can send targeted email to subsets of your customer base i.e. people just on Facebook and ask them to come and join you on Facebook, we had a customer recently do this and not only did they get more fans, their call to action for a sale converted at 2x their lists historical average.

Finally you can integrate Flowtown into your existing application you already use like: iContact, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, BatchBook, Wufoo, SalesForce, Unbounce and Formstack.

The thing that makes us unique is Flowtown is powered by your existing customer base. You import all your contacts and we use your existing customers to get you more customers.

Oli: Is there a way to gauge who the most important people are? The influencers?

Dan: Absolutely yeah. We’ll show you who are the most influential in each of the networks and who is influential in your industry. Who are the highest influencers for marketing or for coffee, or architecture etc.

Oli: So what are some of the ways that you can utilize that layer of data to benefit your other marketing channels.

Dan: One way people have been using it on segmenting your email marketing efforts. We provide an email marketing tool that allows you to take your emails, segment them and invite people on Twitter, that have a certain influence score, living in San Francisco, to an event I’m hosting. A lot of non-profits are using these kinds of geographic filters and increasing their open and click through rates by 250%.

We also show businesses the percentage of customers that are not following them on Twitter, but have a Twitter account and you can send an email just to those people not following you to say “Hey I noticed you’re on twitter so are we, we’d love to connect. Here’s our link.” Some customers get 35 – 40% response in regards to new followers. We’ll show you the before and after, so it’s a great tool for small businesses that are just getting into social media or want to increase their current social media channel with existing customers.

A lot of non-profits are using these kinds of geographic filters and increasing their open and click through rates by 250%.

Oli: Again it comes back to that personal touch that people respond to.

Dan: Exactly. One of the other ways people are using it that I find really innovative, is real-time social notifications. Essentially using social data for lead scoring. If you have a contact form on your landing page, when somebody provides an email, send that email over to Flowtown and based on your filters we’ll notify you with all the information we have about them in real-time so that you can engage with them.

If you noticed that a writer for the New York Times in your industry just signed up or subscribed to your newsletter, your company you can follow up immediately with more knowledge to make a personal connection. We’re trying to give you the tools to be responsive in the social sphere to get you the highest results.

We use it exclusively at Flowtown for all of our press. When somebody signed up we noticed they were a founder of a company, myself or Ethan will contact them directly. Typically through Twitter, sometimes via email cause we obviously have their email address, but we always contact in real-time which shows a level of attention to our users that they are not expecting. This gets back to that whole wow! purple cow, remarkable activities a company could do to increase people caring about them.

Big thanks to Dan Martell for being a Conversion Hero, and providing us with some great insights into social media conversion and customer engagement via social media marketing.

More Conversion Heroes

Part 1: Roberta Rosenberg on Copywriting for Landing Pages
Part 2: Dan Martell on Social Media Conversion
Part 3: Paras Chopra on Split Testing
Part 4: John Hossack on PPC
Part 5: Chris Goward on Conversion Rate Optimization
Part 6: Cindy Alvarez on Point-of-Conversion Feedback
Part 7: Tim Ash on Landing Page Optimization

(Click infographic for full size view)

Social media should be good for business, but there are two lingering problems. Firstly, the stubborn gaggle of non-adopters that doth protest too much – “it should be for personal use, not business”. Secondly, most people that are using social media for inbound marketing are doing a poor job of converting the traffic once it arrives.

If you’re using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. to drive traffic to your business – but the results are less than inspiring – you’re probably making fundamental mistakes during the conversion phase of the social media conversion funnel (see the infographic attached to this post).

The 7 Secrets

While they’re not as sexy as Victoria’s, or even close to being in the same league as “Aladdin’s Cave” – these 7 secrets (shhh) will help you leverage social media in smarter ways to improve your conversions.

SECRET #1 – Use a landing page please

Let’s start with a simple vocal warmup exercise. Repeat this phrase out loud until your coworkers tell you to shut up:

• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”
• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”
• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”

Your homepage is a terrible destination choice for social campaign traffic because your message gets diluted upon arrival. Landing pages on the other hand are purposely designed to be one dimensional so your 140 character tweet (for example) can be expanded upon without distraction from other messages.

From a practical perspective, if you tried to update your homepage to reflect every promotion and lead generation campaign you do, it would quickly turn into an ugly mess and would be impossible to measure or test. Not to mention the grief you’d get trying to convince a boardroom full of stakeholders for approval.

Compare these two (slightly convoluted) scenarios

Scenario A

A friend tells you about a great new flavor of toothpaste (bear with me), and drops you off at the supermarket. If you manage to find the toothpaste aisle, you’ll be so overwhelmed by the choice that the odds of you getting the right kind are akin to pinning the tail on the donkey. And that’s if the magazine rack and the booze section don’t distract you first.

Scenario B

A friend tells you about a great new flavor of toothpaste and takes you to a room dedicated to only that type of toothpaste. There are posters on the wall explaining the benefits and there is a big shiny cash register with a large “buy the toothpaste you are looking for here” sign above it.

Which scenario do you want your customers to experience? (The correct answer is B).

SECRET #2 – Social message match

The primary message on your landing page should be the same (or reflective of) what you said in your social media channel. Like positive reinforcement for dogs, seeing a familiar message adds to the feeling that you made a “good” click. Conversely, not having a matched message can make your visitors feel lost – at which point they head for the comfort of the back button.

Stick to the tone of your seed message. Chances are that if someone clicked on your link then they connected with your style. If you are using a quirky short form on Twitter, repeat this on the landing page. If you’re driving corporate business traffic from LinkedIn then maintain a more formal style. Consistency is the key here.

For extra reinforcement, use an icon or design element that reflects the upstream social source. There are a million free social media icons that you can use for this purpose. It can work a little like a socially co-branded experience between the source and your brand; where you can clearly tell where you came from and where you are going.

[TIP] Use a landing page for each traffic source

Using a different landing page for each social media traffic source lets you personalize the experience and improves the social message match. It also makes it much easier to track the performance of your pages and determine which traffic source converts the best.

[Example] – Contextual social message match

The WP Greet Box WordPress plugin is used to provide a contextually relevant icon and message to visitors from social media sites. It detects where you came form and suggests that you follow/like etc.

SECRET #3 – Social proof via social media widgets

Most people are a bit like sheep. They have no idea where they are going and no idea if it’s a good idea. Our herd mentality makes us want constant validation that our choices are sound. We do this by seeking reviews of products and services and we observe the reactions of others as they experience the goods before us.

Imagine walking down a street; on one side is a person staring straight up, on the other side is a large group of 30 people all looking up at the sky. We are programmed to react more strongly to the inferred wisdom of the crowd and will gravitate towards checking out what the group is doing first.

This is a form of social proof, which can be used in the digital realm as an aide to conversion manipulation or optimization. There are a few techniques you can use to replicate it on your landing page:

• Show your popularity: use a social media widget to show how many Twitter followers, article retweet’s and Facebook likes/fans you have.

  

• Show your success: testimonials show people that you have made someone else happy. Make sure they are authentic and provide a photo if possible. Ideally show the support of an influencer in the common space you share with your customers. You can also use social media widgets to show a timeline of “reactions” from various channels (such as an @yourname feed from Twitter).

Cats are like sheep too

Whiskas cat food used this concept to great effect in their 80s/90s ad campaigns declaring: 8 out of 10 cats prefer it. People believed it then, they’ll believe it now, especially if you show the proof.

SECRET #4 – Make it easy to share with social media widgets

Having your content shared might not be your primary conversion goal, but it can be an important source of bonus traffic – or it can be the difference between mild and epic success. The multiplicative effects of viral exposure are often the tipping point in a social media campaign.

Motivation comes in numerous forms from self expression (the online equivalent of placing your favourite books or CDs in view for your houseguests) to status (the “I saw it first” effect). Some people are gagging to find quality content to share as it reflects well on their perceived connectedness. If you have a great product, service or offer, enhance this motivational desire by making it really simple to share. Test different sharing mechanisms to see which your audience responds to the most.

No barrier to entry

One of the simplest sharing methods for Facebook users is the new Like button widget. Many Facebook’ers are in a permanently logged-in state – which lets them interact in a single click without leaving your page.

Familiarity breeds interaction

Be consistent with your traffic source, e.g. if they arrived via Twitter – have a Retweet button as it offers the lowest barrier to your “sharing” conversion goal.

[Example] – follow and share to enter a contest

This example uses Twitter widgets to ask people to follow and share in order to gain entry to a contest. (Source http://campl.us/ – update: the contest is no longer running so this part has been removed from the page).

SECRET #5 – The world’s shortest lead gen form

Conversion is a balancing act between enticement and resistance (barriers to entry).

If you are collecting leads (personal data such as name, email, phone number, company, website etc.) then your lead gen form is a barrier to entry and the size of the barrier is directly correlated to the size of the form (number of fields).

When collecting personal data, you need to offer something back to the customer in exchange, such as a whitepaper, webinar registration, eBook and so on. The more relevant and interesting your giveaway is, the larger you can make the hurdle.

This balance can be tough to achieve, when people in your company are asking you to add extra fields to the form to get the data they so badly need.

A solution to this is to remove every field from your form except the email address.

In the past this would mean you would have empty meaningless data and the subsequent email campaigns targeting these new leads would be impersonal (no first name). With the use of post-conversion social discovery tools like Rapleaf you can get the best of both worlds, by lowering the barrier to entry all the way down, while still receiving the data you need.

Secret #7 below sheds more light on this. But for now the important lesson is that you can greatly increase your conversion rate on lead gen campaigns by leveraging the power of a short form – without sacrificing the quality of your data.

SECRET #6 – Use a safety net CTA

Sadly, not everyone that comes to your landing page is ready to convert. They may be window shopping, browsing or just curious about what you have to say. By offering a secondary call to action (CTA) you can sometimes persuade the visitor to maintain a connection with you.

The simplest ways to do this are to provide a method to:

• Follow you on Twitter
• Like your Facebook page or group
• Join a LinkedIn group
• Bookmark you on Delicious

Even if 1 in 100 decide to do this, it adds up to future conversion potential because they have entered your sphere of brand influence.

Note: You don’t want this to take away from your primary CTA, so place it in the footer or near the bottom of the page.

SECRET #7 – Post-conversion social discovery

Post-conversion strategy is a completely overlooked part of the sales funnel. You got your conversion and you got your lead so everything’s good right? Wrong.

There are 2 main ways to optimize your post-conversion opportunities:

• Good: Place additional CTA’s on your confirmation or thankyou page (after they complete your lead gen form). This can help to reduce clutter on your landing page. And you can also suggest a page on your website as their next step – knowing that they have a qualified level of interest.
• Better: Turn the email into a complete social profile using a service like Rapleaf. This gives your leads an identity and sets you up for more targeted follow-up marketing. Your first contact with the prospect is critical, and the more you know about them the better. By connecting based on real profile data you look like someone who’s made the effort to do some research before making contact. This is a massive conversion advantage.

As I mentioned in secret #5, social discovery lets you shorten your lead gen forms to improve your conversion rate. And while it’s true that a social profile may not answer every question you have about your new prospects, what it does is provide you with a level of personal data that can start a more effective conversation.

In Summary

For your next social media campaign or promotion, try a few of the 7 secrets to improve the conversion phase of your social media funnel. As a starting point, make sure you begin with #1, #2, #5 and #7 on your next lead gen landing page.

A word of caution: using all 7 secrets at once may cause undesirable side-effects such as content bloating and sweaty widgets. If you don’t need a form, don’t use one (obvious), and if you want to utilize social sharing widgets, pick one (relevant to your audience) not twenty.

Share this post

– Oli Gardner

The more people that interact with their opinions, the better the post will become and I’ll re-incorporate them into the post as we go.

How Does/Will Social Media Affect Landing Page Conversion rates?

Social media is no longer the next big thing, it’s just simply an interaction medium that proliferates all aspects of online life. As such, it will naturally begin to infiltrate the discipline of internet marketing. How this happens is yet to be determined. There seem to be a few toes being dipped in the water, but it’s a little early to get a clear picture of where it’s headed and what’s been successful thus far.

And so, I have some questions:

Brainstorm Questions

If you have any opinions/answers, please comment below.

In what ways can you incorporate social media into a landing page?

There are a whole bunch of social media widgets that can be inserted into a landing page:

• Twitter streams
• Facebook updates
• Flickr photostreams
• Blog RSS
• YouTube Video?
• Etc.

What other examples are there?
What are the uses of each type?

Is there an exception to be made re: the single goal of a landing page?

Typically a landing page should be highly focused on a single goal. However, I believe there is value in using a secondary “Safety Net” call to action (CTA) that captures the people who are not quite ready to convert. An example of this would be “Follow me on Twitter”. This allows you to maintain a post-bounce connection with the visitor, and lets them commit to something less intimidating than the Buy Now button.

What do you think about this concept?
What other examples are there when applied to different social media interactions?

What benefits are there to be gained from social media integration?

What strikes me initially is that social media integration can improve your landing pages in the following ways:

1. Increased trust: social proof factors (e.g. a large following) can make you more credible
2. A modern mindset: depending on your demographic and campaign topic it could enhance the appeal of your landing page
3. The primary goal: If your primary goal is to grow your social network then inclusion of social interaction points is clearly relevant

What other benefits are there?

Please share your thoughts and experiences below.

Cheers

– Oli Gardner

Don't be mean and you'll be fine on Twitter...

This is a simple idea that came to me late tonight while doing my regular Twitter karma health check. A karma health check is just an exercise to see who is talking about you in either a positive or negative way via one of many social media channels.

The basic concept is to maintain 2 private Twitter lists, one with positive mentions of your name or brand, and one with any negative discussions that are happening in the Twittersphere.

A Simple 3-Step Process

In about 15 minutes you will have a powerful method of identifying and prioritizing an essential part of your social media workload.

Follow along, it’s positively (or negatively) awesome…

Step 1 – Create your Twitter Karma Lists

Create 2 new lists in Twitter called “Good Karma” and “Bad Karma”. Make them both private as this isn’t for public consumption – just your own personal productivity and customer interaction management.

Step 2 – Start with Good Twitter Karma

Now you’ll want to hit the @unbounce (use your own name) link in the right-hand menu of Twitter. This will show you most of the mentions you’ve had. I find that it can miss quite a few mentions for some reason, so a more accurate method is to enter your account name in the search box and use that for your results.

Now walk through every person that mentioned you. Add them to the Good Karma Twitter List if they said something nice about you or retweeted your content.

Step 3 – Finish with Bad Twitter Karma

Repeat the process and add anyone that may have said something negative (hopefully unless you are a massive company there will be none or very few of these).

Putting Your Lists Into Play

Now that you have your Karma lists set up you need to do something with them.

Squash Bad Karma

Bad Karma comes first this time around. Deal with all potential customer service or personal brand issues immediately and do it in a transparent and honest way – starting with a public apology and a promise to deal with the situation immediately. You might want to jump back on Twitter after resolving an issue to check in with the person who made the complaint, to try and entice an “it’s all good now dude” response from the customer – this is amazing PR.

Nurture Your Good Karma As Often As Possible

This is the fun part. Set aside a portion of your week to re-connect with your fans and friends. The idea is to recognize and reward the people who have done right by you. If you have a few minutes to spare, you can dip into your Good Karma Jar any time you like and do something good for someone else.

Happy happy, joy joy. Buddha from Cafe Press - http://bit.ly/86WNZ5

Some ways you can pay it back or pay it forward:

1. Thank people for retweeting your content
2. Send a direct message to follow up on a previous interaction
3. Start a new conversation (either publicly with @ or privately with a direct message – DM) about something they’ve said recently on Twitter
4. Retweet their content as a thank-you
5. Comment on something they’ve said
6. Add them to your public lists – this makes people feel valued and part of a more personal social network

The whole point here it to maintain relationships and hopefully take them to a higher level. Social success is all about finding the right mixture of mavens (that sell your virtues to others), and connectors (that have a large and important network) and then giving back as much as you can to keep the social circle of life going. (Don’t know about you, but writing that made me think of the Lion King).

At the end of the day you get back what you put in.

My advice is strive to put more in than what you take out. After all it’s all about Karma.

Repeat Weekly

Try to repeat this process every week or so (determine your own timeline based on how much social interaction you get on Twitter).

Told you it was simple…

– Oli Gardner

Follow the trail of content.

If you’re like me, you’ll have those moments where all you want is to be presented with a kick-ass list of relevant and personalized content to consume on demand.

Despite my attempts to pull together the uber RSS feed list, I’ve always been left wanting – until yesterday when I invented (for myself) the idea of Social Breadcrumbs for content discovery on Twitter.

I’m referring to my last post – HOW TO: Use Twitter as a knowledge filter – that illustrates how you can build your own library of automatically filtered content by using Twitter lists to keep track of a few select rock stars and their favourite things, and more importantly a process for creating your library.

In a super short time, you can uncover a bucketload of inspirational material that will be there for you every day.

Sounds Like a List of RSS Feeds

Yes it does, but it’s not. The difference lies in the fact that the your Twitter library flexes and bends at a much more rapid rate and includes not only the content of the people you respect, but the topic du jour that they pass down the chain.

And so, to complete the circle of my social breadcrumbs idea, here are 16 articles I found by traversing the last 24hrs on my own Twitter library.

As a bonus – in the spirit of the value-add filter – I’ve gone ahead and read every one of these articles to provide a takeaway for each – “The one thing I learned”.

CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION

1. Which Test Won: PPC Landing Page A/B Test – Which Version Made More Ecommerce Sales?

http://whichtestwon.com/ppc-ecommerce/
One Thing I Learned: Gut instinct is important when it comes to landing page design. Why? Because impatient visitors use their guts to decide how they feel about your landing page. And for the record I chose the right answer in the test. :)
Via: @copywritermaven

2. 10+ Free Resources for Creating High Converting Call-to-Action Buttons

http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/free-resources-for-creatinghigh-converting-call-to-action-buttons/
One Thing I Learned: Despite being a functionally simple component, the “button” is cause for much speculatory design in an attempt to make it more clickable: from visual design to the writing of the Call To Action.
Via: @pricing @wingify

INTERNET MARKETING

3. 9 new marketing tools you need

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/25136.asp
One Thing I Learned: There are a massive amount of new apps out there that could genuinely make a difference to your work life. “The biggest challenge is finding the time to give them all a real trial.”
Via: @aaranged

Side Note: they need to update their URL structure – the 25136.asp post name is a tad old school.

DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

4. 65+ Popular Web Design And Development Blog To Follow On Twitter

http://www.themeflash.com/65-popular-web-design-and-development-blog-to-follow-on-twitter/
One Thing I Learned: That the principles I’m advocating with this post (and the previous one) about trust networks are ringing more true as I write this. This is an awesome collection of design and dev sites and a great source for building a Twitter List.

If they’d ended the post with a ready-made twitter list of all 65 sites that would have been epic. Aaaand having thought that, I had to go off and do it myself.

You can now subscribe to the entire 65 Twitter accounts in my new list here 65+ Popular Web Design And Development Blog To Follow On Twitter.

Via: @copywritermaven

5. Typography is the backbone of good web design

http://www.thedesigncubicle.com/2009/11/typography-is-the-backbone-of-good-web-design/
One Thing I Learned: Using letter-spacing (CSS) to improve typographic styling when using all-caps. There are beautiful examples in this post.
Via: @behoff

SOCIAL MEDIA

6. Matrix: The Four Social Support Strategies

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/11/18/matrix-the-four-social-support-strategies/
One Thing I Learned: The 4 ways you can respond to your customers using social media along with their pros and cons. Most have something to offer – some more than others (automated responses via Twitter would just be like lame email autoresponders: impersonal and frustrating) – and can be leveraged across your many customer interface points.
Via: @jaypiddy

EMAIL MARKETING

7. ‘Share-to-Social’ Email Tools Grow Up

http://www.marketingvox.com/share-to-social-email-tools-grow-up-045542/
Some good numbers from a report on the effects of social sharing from emails.
One Thing I Learned: The average social sharing rate on emails is 0.5% – compared with the less than 0.1% rate realized by earlier-generation forward-to-a-friend campaigns.
Via: @jaypiddy

SEO/SEM

8. Whiteboard Friday – Link Growth Patterns

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-special-wednesday-edition-link-growth-patterns
One Thing I Learned: Search engines position may spike then fall if you don’t maintain your rate of link acquisition surrounding a PR push at launch – Google may overcompensate showing an over-performance followed by a sharp dip.
Via: @seomoz

9. Flying Solo: The One-Person In-House SEO Team

http://searchengineland.com/flying-solo-the-one-person-in-house-seo-team-29873
One Thing I Learned: When communicating to management about the potential success of an infant SEO strategy bey honest: “SEO efforts are just underway; there is no historical data that can be used to create meaningful predictive models, and any numbers I could come up would basically be bunk.”
Via: @aaranged

10. Headsmacking Tip #16: Meet the Linkerati in Person

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/headsmacking-tip-16-meet-the-linkerati-in-person
One Thing I Learned: That people respond better to the personal touch, always. And being authentic and having the balls to engage someone on a personal level can pay off massively.
Via: @randfish

11. 5 Simple Tips for Better SEO Value from Your Feeds

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-simple-tips-for-better-seo-value-from-your-blogs-feeds
One Thing I Learned: You can do a lot more with your RSS feeds than simply have a link to them on your site.
Via: @randfish

ANALYTICS

12. Funnels on the Fly in Google Analytics

http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2009/11/funnels_on_the_fly_in_google_analytics.html
One Thing I Learned: You can feel like a secret genius by using retroactive advanced segments to break down your conversion funnels after the fact (yeah that’s what retroactive means) – which gets around having to know in advance exactly what you need to measure.
Via: @dannomatic

CMS

13. WordPress Wins CMS Award

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/11/wordpress-wins-cms-award/
One Thing I Learned: WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Seems it’s grown up to the point that it’s not just a blogging platform. I concur.
Via: @honeypot_mkting

USABILITY

14. Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html
One Thing I Learned: Great content is timeless. Despite being published in 2005, and despite his insistence on called a blog a weblog (perhaps blog hadn’t caught on yet) – this post by Jakob Nielsen still rings very soundly true. Now if only he’d use his brain to write a NEW book…
Via: @joshsummerhays @KISSmetrics

GOOGLE

15. Google replaces URLs with breadcrumb links in search results

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-replaces-urls-with-breadcrumb-links-in-search-results/
One Thing I Learned: There is a lot of passionate debate over whether it’s a good idea to remove the URL crafted by the site’s owner and replace it with an architectural breadcrumb that exposes a sites inner hierarchy.
Via: @patrickaltoft

FUNNY

16. Australian Society of Section Car Operators

http://www.assco.org.au/
One Thing I Learned: When creating an acronym for your company, do a big paper prototype and look at it from across the room before having a logo designed.
Via: @chrisgoward

The one BIG thing I learned

I can TRUST my network to come through with great insight and content. And remember, this is the result of a brief look over my network highlights from the last 24hrs and right now my list only contain about 30 key people. When I fill out my complete top-100 it will be pretty fine.

Many thanks to the authors of these excellent articles. Keep ‘em coming.

Props go out to: (Follow these people)

• @copywritermaven – Roberta Rosenberg: The Copywriter Maven
• @pricing
• @wingify
• @aaranged – Aaron Bradley: SEM Stalwart
• @behoff
• @jaypiddy – A Good Friend
• @seomoz
• @randfish – Remarkably comfortable in front of the camera
• @dannomatic – Another good friend: despite the fact that he punched me in the head one time ;)
• @honeypot_mkting – Dan’s SEM business
• @joshsummerhays
• @KISSmetrics – Rock ‘n’ Roll All Night, And Party Every Day
• @patrickaltoft
• @chrisgoward – Co-founder of Wider Funnel: One of the best optimization crews around

– Oli Gardner

Filtering awesomeness from non-awesomeness has never been easier. Just use social breadcrumbs.

There are tens of thousands of new blog posts created every day

Holy sh** Batman that’s a lot of information, I hope you have a “content filter” clipped to your utility belt.

Never fear. With a little networking legwork, a content sniffer dog and Twitter lists, you can create your very own personal recommendation engine.

There are many methods for dealing with the wealth of information zipping round the web, RSS readers being one of the better methods. But you still need a way to find the best content before subscribing to it.

Let Social Breadcrumbs Lead You Through The Network

Your search for quality content begins with the use of Social Breadcrumbs – the trail of awesomeness created via Trust Networks. I’m calling them social breadcrumbs due to the process of stepping through the Twitter forest, following tasty 140-character clues on your way to the edible house that is personalized and trusted commentary.

Here’s how it works:

1. Create a Twitter List. Pick a subject that you are passionate about (for us it might be landing pages) and create a new Twitter List with that name.
2. Pick your most trusted source of golden Tweetage. Add this person to your new list.
3. Add people from their network. Chances are that the person you trust the most follows other like minded souls, so browsing through some of their “following” list will uncover people worth adding to your new list. This involves a bit of effort as you only see the latest Tweet by each which means you’ll miss some good ones, or could be fooled by charlatans. If you have time click through to the time-lines of the best ones. Look for people who mix recommended content with meaningful original thought.
4. Spider outwards. You can repeat this process, by crawling the following lists of each new connection you find.
5. Leverage social shortcuts – HIGHLY recommended. A secondary benefit of Twitter Lists is that you can get a head start on your search by simply latching on to your trusted sources’ own lists. You could follow the entire list as a group, but to add your own personal preference watch the lists time-line for a while (and click back in time) to find those Tweeters most relevant to your new list.
6. Use #hashtags to find conversations. Enter #searchterm into that little search box on Twitter to see who is saying something smart and use them as a new breadcrumb seed.
7. Use that old dinosaur called Google. This could be inserted at the start of the process if you didn’t have a favourite Twitter’er already. Do some searches on relevant topics to discover articles and hence blogs and authors that are covering your subject matter. Look for their Twitter id’s and add them to your new list.
8. ROCK. RINSE. REPEAT. Play some banging tunes while you rock out in Twitterland. It’s more fun that way.

Let Your Filter Shower You With Golden Content Goodness!

Now that you have an uber list targeted to one of your interests you can use this as your de facto Twitter homepage and lo and behold – you now have your own personal taste maker study group, happily filtering the internet for the things you care about.

Why is this so awesome? Because the subjects and their subject matter are people that you – and the network – trust. As they say in advertising, word of mouth is the most powerful sales tool you possess.

By using Twitter lists and the simple process of following Social Breadcrumbs, you have a brand new stream of opinionated and filtered content.

Beautiful.

– Oli Gardner

A little bird told me you should have a safe and friendly nest for your Twitter visitors

Twitter landing pages have become a popular method of providing customized experiences for social media visitors.

But exactly what is a Twitter landing page, and how do they compare to the other types of landing page you might be using for your internet marketing? I’ll answer that question and provide some examples of Twitter landing pages that other people have created.

Twitter Landing Pages

A Twitter landing page is a page on your website specifically designed to receive inbound traffic from your profile on Twitter. If you use Twitter to promote your personal or business brand, then just like any other form of campaign or advertising, the effectiveness of your traffic is directly related to the experience you create for your visitors.

The Inbound Link

A standard part of your Twitter profile is the “Web:” attribute that allows you to provide a link to your website or blog. Rather than sending people directly to your homepage you can (and should) create a specialized and focused Twitter landing page for them.

The goal of your Twitter landing page should be to provide quick access to who you are and what you do – bearing in mind that the interested party is a Twitter user, sort of like a mixture of a social and business FAQ.

Why Should I Use a Twitter Landing Page?

Anyone familiar with the concept of landing pages (or this blog) will know that sending people to your homepage will result in a lower conversion rate due to the unfocused and generic messaging they receive there.

When someone clicks on the link in your Twitter profile, they want to know more about you and what you do. You could send them to your About Us page, but knowing they are visiting from Twitter gives you more opportunities for personalization. They may be used to listening to what you say in your Tweets, so there is an established tone that you can repeat on this page.

You have an opportunity to extend the basic profile that appears on Twitter and give them a quick overview of the information and content they are likely to be seeking.

More benefits of a Twitter landing page:

• Improved message match. Like any landing page, you number 1 goal is to match the expectation of the visitor at the time of click, to the experience upon arrival. A Twitter landing page gives you the opportunity to speak to people regarding a shared connection.
• Removing barriers to entry. By inserting a landing page in the user pathway you could be introducing an extra click, however when the pathway is clear and focused this is less of a barrier and more of a guidance tool.
• The personal touch: Twitter is a social medium that probably brings out a style different from the rest of your website. Use your Twitter landing page to provide an intermediary experience that combines the punchy short-form personality of your Tweets with a more professional demeanor.

What Should I Put on My Twitter Landing Page

It depends largely on what your site is about (a personal blog or a business website), but here are some elements for consideration:

• A profile photo. If you use a photo on your Twitter profile, repeating it here completes a personal connection.
• A welcome message. Welcome messages can be wasteful on your homepage, but here you are engaging with someone from a social venue, so greet them as such, mentioning the fact that they are arriving from Twitter.
• A personal elevator pitch. Even your Twitter profile is business focused, it’s nice to provide some detail of the person behind the logo. A single paragraph of interesting personal info increases trust and transparency.
• The business elevator pitch. A short summation of what would typically appear on your “About Us” page.
• Your online network. List all of your online interaction points: LinkedIn, other Twitter accounts (your CEO or customer service), Facebook etc… You don’t kow at this point which is their primary social media venue of choice, so let people choose how to interact with you.
• Greatest Hits. Provide a short list (such as a Top 10) of your best content such as blog posts, or product/service benefits and features.
• Special Twitter Only Offers: To make visitors feel special, provide coupons/vouchers for discounts on your product or service, just for Twitter users. It’s common practice to ask that they follow you in order to participate.

Example Twitter Landing Pages

Here are a few sample Twitter landing pages that I’ve come across, starting with one by Laura Fitton, who is regarded as being the originator of the idea.

• Laura Fitton – @Pistachio
• Darren Rowse – @ProBlogger
• Whole Foods – @WholeFoods
• Dell – @DellOutlet
• National Association of Professional Photographers – @NAPP_News

What About Other Social Media Visitors?

You can follow the exact same principle for visitor from other sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg or Delicious. Remember that these landing pages are used to provide an enhanced and expected experience for your visitors, so you should be tailoring experiences for each user type based on an understanding of what they are hoping to achieve by visiting your site.

In the end Twitter landing pages are no different from regular standalone landing pages – they are used to focus the visitors attention, present a high degree of message match and gently guide your users toward their goals with as few negative barriers as possible.

In case you’re wondering why we don’t have one, we’re in the midst of the design of the new Unbounce website for our impending launch, at which point we’ll unveil our own Twitter landing page.

— Oli Gardner

Being on someone's Twitter List is the new Black.

If were lucky enough to get on the inside track with Twitter, you’ll have be granted access the beta of their latest feature – Twitter Lists.

Today, most Twitter accounts have had this new feature enabled and it’s starting to gain massive traction.

What is a Twitter List?

It’s a simple yet powerful feature that lets you group Twitter users into lists that you create, manage and name. What it does is allow you to separate your Twitter reading time into more targeted use.

Twitter users who are following a large number of people will find it particularly useful as it allows you to create a subset of your favorite Tweeter’s and get the skinny on what they and only they are doing. Brilliant, and about time.

The New Twitter Popularity Gauge

Prior to lists, the primary way of associating popularity with a user was their Twitter follower count, which shows how many people are keeping up to date with their activities. Now with lists, people are re-categorizing, and rating the people they really want to follow.

What is appearing now is a new indicator of popularity – The Listed Count – that shows how many people have added you to a list.

You can take a look at everyone who’s added you to their lists which gives you insight into how they regard you. At Unbounce I’ve just started getting into listmania, and the first order of business was to create 2 new lists – my Top 10 and Top 100. Now, whenever I come across someone really interesting I can add them to one of these lists that will receive my priority attention. In a sense they are like micro-blogging magazines containing only your favorite authors.

What can you use Twitter Lists for?

Here are a few more ways you can leverage Twitter lists to have a more enjoyable and focused time in the Twittersphere:

1. Categorize people by subject matter (e.g. photography, seo, design, funny, awesome, inspirational).
2. Follow someone else’s entire list with a single click.
3. Create private or public lists – this enables you to keep a private record of your favorite Tweeters or become a list maven by compiling useful lists for others to follow.
4. Share your list – each list has a permalink so you can send it to others.

On the Unbounce, you’ll find our musings about landing pages, conversion marketing and other related topics. Drop by and check us out on Twitter and if you like us, throw us on a new list.

Cheers,

– Oli Gardner