Twitter is the biggest Social Media phenomenon of the current time, and as such should be leveraged as much as possible, while staying true to your authentic & respectful brand values.
Landing pages are used by marketers to receive traffic from many destinations, including Twitter. The basic theory with landing pages being that you have a single, easily digestible message to deliver, and a single required action you wish your customers to perform.
So how do we tie the two together? Well, one obvious way would be to create landing pages for the product or service you are marketing and send traffic to it via Twitter. But that’s not what we’re going to discuss today. Instead, I’d like to touch on how you can leverage this uber-trendy social media service to improve your landing page conversions when people arrive via other means (banners, AdWords, organic search etc).
Bounce rate is the arch nemesis of the landing page, so let’s explore how we can utilize your Twitter account and network to help reduce the number of customers bugging out.
How can I use Twitter to improve conversions on my next landing page?
Today we’ll explore some tactics for improving your landing pages with Twitter, and learn that it’s more than simply an active communication tool.
1. In Popularity We Trust
If you have a significant number of Twitter followers then you can use this to your advantage on your landing pages. What is significant? Ideally you have 1000+ people following you, but anything over 300 can look respectable and puts you in the upper percentile. To be truly authentic you must show a live count of your following, perhaps alongside the standard mini-thumbnail matrix or the latest people to follow you.
Why should you show your followers? To build credibility and trust. It’s like adding a social client list to your website or resume, and indicates that you are recognized in your space as someone worth paying attention to. People are heavily influenced by the actions of others, and if they can see that others are showing you support, they may just be that little more inclined to consider you worthy of their time, money or email address.
2. Use A Safety Net To Provide Future Brand Exposure
Sometimes, a prospective customer will arrive at your landing page and won’t be ready to act. They might need to do some more research on your product, figure out if it’s affordable or compare it to your competitors offerings. Or it might just be bad timing, and they are there out of pure curiosity.
So how do you get something out of them before they leave?
Some would try interruption marketing tactics and throw up a dialog or pop-up as you leave the page, but that’s not something we support here at Unbounce. Instead we recommend that you employ a safety net call to action (CTA) that is a halfway measure designed to illicit a non-committal action from your visitors.
Simply by suggesting that someone “follow you” on Twitter, gives the visitor a sense of achievement and connection (they can come back to you later), while allowing you to issue permission marketing messages to them via Twitter.
Some Simple Math
If you have a bounce rate of 80% (for example), and 10% of those people submit to your secondary safety net – you have just made an 8% increase in your target-able audience.
3. Live Updates
Landing pages traditionally present a rather static view of marketing messaging. As micro-blogging increases in popularity, people are becoming used to bit-sized chunks of real-time information. Try adding your Twitter timeline to your landing page to give it a “live” and fresh feeling.
By including this content, you are increasing the chance that a visitor will spend more time on your landing page. It stands to reason that if someone is exposed to your message for a longer period of time, that they will be more likely to believe that message.
Twitter, when used correctly, can also provide an increased sense of authenticity as your personality can shine through from your updates.
An Evolving Landing Page
An extra benefit of this approach it that it allows you to actually control the content that appears on the landing page throughout your campaign. By paying close attention to your analytics, you may uncover ways of improving your conversions by discussing certain topics, or offering time sensitive offers within the Twitter component on your page.
4. Transparency – Meet The Family
It’s becoming increasingly common for Twitter to be used as a communication and customer service tool. By opening a direct communication channel to different functional units of your company, you increase the transparency of your organization which gives you a big trust boost.
To appeal to many potential customer types, consider having different people in your company set up their own personal Twitter account and introduce them on your landing page (probably best presented in the footer or as a “meet the company” sidebar).
Examples of people to introduce to your customers are:
- Customer Service – if you openly answer your clients questions, you will help others with the same problem while letting people know you are open about discussing issues.
- CEO – having the figurehead of your company share their vision and provide a glimpse into his/her personal life can make people feel part of the solution.
- Functional Units – appoint a vocal representative from important departments such as marketing, IT, design, web development and sales.
You can learn an incredible amount from your clients through an open dialog.
5. Cool People Like Other Cool People – Twitter Lead Capture
This one is simple, expose your brand and make visitors think you are awesome. Twitter is so omnipresent in popular culture that showing you are a participant and doing what other cool kids are doing can be enough to give you some popularity points. It tells people you are current and like to work with the latest tools and marketing channels.
Instead of trying to sell a product – try selling your brand.
Throw up a landing page just to gather Twitter followers and use your brand communication to explain why people should care about you and your message.
Simply stating “We’re here, we’re cool, and we’re not interested in hard sales tactics” can buy you a loyal following that you can leverage at a later date.
Unbounce Challenge
Can you think of any other ways that Twitter can be used to improve landing page conversions?
Comment below with your ideas.
