Social media hacks: Call to action

A lot of people have the wrong idea of what social media actually is, and what it isn’t.

Social media is not direct sales media, not direct marketing media, not call to action media and not a money making media.

Social media, is a relationship building platform.

So, first of all if you want to grow on social media, you need to build a relationship with your audience. And you do that with some sort of relativity.

And you do this by creating a relationship between the problems that your audience has, the things that entertain them, the things that they laugh at, and the things they aspire to do – through your content.

Social media does however, give opportunity to the mere exposure effect where people develop a preference for something simply because they’re exposed to it on a very regular basis.

Knowing this, we need to understand how to use social media in a way that isn’t a call to action, or monetisation mechanism, but still gives the opportunity for the mere exposure effect.

This is how I do it…

I like to expose them to, ideally, at least 10-20 plus pieces of content before I throw a call to action out into a sequence. That way the skeptical friction is removed from people’s perception. It’s that friction that prevents people from doing the things that you want them to do.

The way that you remove the skepticism is by providing value content consistently. Consistently to the point where the skepticism is gone, and they now trust you, like and respect you.

Then when you throw a piece of call to action content out in front of them, you don’t have to be a sales and marketing douche bag to get a reasonable response – you now have some sort of credibility.

Let me also put it to you this way…

A soft call to action will always outperform a strong call to action when it’s delivered in the right part of the sequence.

As an example, if you execute a strong call to action at the front end of your Facebook marketing campaign, it’s not going to work nearly as well as a soft call to action that someone sees after 10 or 20 exposures to really high quality content that they can relate to, and connect to, on a much deeper level.

My advice is to focus on building the relationship and focus less on the call to action. From doing that, the call to actions and monetisation will take care of themselves.

If you want to study call to actions, study Dan Kennedy or Jay Abrahams, they’re a good place to start.

Remember, above all, social media requires you to be just that – social.