Make Conversation the Key To Facebook Conversions

The Conversation, The Interaction With People Really Is The Key

I’d like to share the conclusions of a recent Facebook study. It seems some of the things you control in the process really mater. Like providing great content and engaging with your fans so they will want to buy from you. It’s the interactions between people that are the primary driver of conversions on social networks.

Here are some of the insights from this study:

“Your content should act as a vehicle for user interaction

First off, there’s this whole thing about user-generated content having more influence on sales than marketer-generated content. Does that mean we as marketers shouldn’t even bother producing content, that we should just open the page up as a free-for-all? Especially when we see that only direct interactions boost sales?

Not exactly.

Instead, we need to think of marketer-generated content as a vehicle to create interactions between users. A piece of content that gets shared a lot but that doesn’t lend itself to conversation probably isn’t going to do much for conversions either.

A piece of marketer-generated content aimed at your general audience (as opposed to a single person) should have two primary goals:

• To get shared in order to expand reach (more on that later).


• To get commented on in order to increase your conversion rate.

As the study shows, user-generated content has the strongest impact on conversions. And the more comments you get, the higher your average lifetime customer value will become.

The more comments you get, the higher your lifetime customer value will become.

If you’re still working at increasing the conversation around your blog posts, there are other ways you can interact directly with your audience. Shopify recommends posting surveys or asking questions to get your audience involved.

The more opinions the better

The study sheds light on another interesting aspect of conversion psychology.

Information-rich user-generated content increased sales regardless of whether the tone was positive or negative. This mirrors what we said about customer reviews a few months ago. A diverse range of opinions helps sales as opposed to hurting it.

While the study found several instances where positive interactions were more helpful than negative ones, they didn’t find any cases where negative interactions actually hurt sales.

Focus on creating those interactions (whether good or constructive) by getting people talking.

Leverage user interactions for greater reach

By now, I hope the insights above have convinced you that it’s time to step up meaningful interactions with your audience on Facebook. And while I’m sure you see the benefit of keeping your existing audience engaged, you likely also want to leverage those interactions to help your audience grow in size.

This is a dilemma faced daily by smart marketers everywhere: the struggle between expanding your reach and keeping your existing audience. Keeping an audience is the hardest part. In order to make it work, typically, you need more than surface-level content. You need depth.

And, of course, that’s a huge problem when you also need to get shared on social networks. Because what gets shared on social networks is almost never in-depth.

True, Facebook’s increased prominence and visual weight for link posts has helped a lot, but at the end of the day, most of what you see in your Facebook feed still has unattractive or no images.

So we’re faced with a dilemma. If we want to retain an audience, we need in-depth, actionable, useful blog posts. But if we want to expand our reach on social networks, we need bite-size visual content that produces an instant emotional reaction.

The solution to this problem is to  embed links to our blogs where we have engaging images or videos on every post. 

Embed your way to more reach and engagement

By embedding bite-sized Facebook posts directly into your blog posts, you can complement the traditional Facebook process in a number of ways:

• Who cares if average Facebook reach is down to 6%? If you have an email list with a high conversion rate, you can send a much larger portion of your audience directly to a blog post containing an embedded Facebook post. Your initial reach will almost always be larger on your blog than if you simply post it to your wall.


• While including a Facebook share button on your blog is a good idea,many people will more readily share a bite-size piece of content on their wall rather than a whole blog post.


• Embeds add flavor to your blog posts by making them more interactive and visual.


• You can use the text field of your Facebook post to link back to the blog post in order to ratchet up your referral traffic.

The goal here is to take Facebook itself out of the equation as much as possible.You’re not trying to game Facebook’s algorithm and you’re not relying on Facebook as your primary platform. Instead, you’re using your own site and your own email list to build up an audience and merely using Facebook to expand it.

Continue reading more at the source for a tutorial on how to embed links in Facebook posts.

I have to agree with this article. It make a lot of sense to drive the traffic back to your website where you can make money with ads. Ads for your products or ads from the ad agencies were you get paid. Even more important is to encourage the coversation to continue with sharing buttons for numerous other social media sites and to encourage visitors to leave comments.

What other tips do you have to increase engagement on your website?

Make Conversation the Key To Facebook Conversions