Monetising Social Media, Top Tips

Cam Cox, Work Experience

How can you monetise your social media? How do you find followers and sponsors? What methods are most effective at bring in revenue?

During my work experience with Usable media, they asked me to research schemes that they work with.

  • Affiliate schemes
  • Sell own products
  • Google Adsense
  • Sponsorship
  •  Automation
  •  Follow/Unfollow
  • Hashtags

My results:

I owned an existing instagram account and decided to use it as an experimental project on different marketing techniques. It soon became very apparent which was the most effective method of monetising the account. After 5 days, I ended up with 4040 followers.

Methods:

There were three main methods that I tested to see how effective they were. The main thing that was suggested on the internet was to grow your follower base which invariably would attract other brands to sponsor you. A method I used was simply to follow and then unfollow related people who were interested in the topic of what my account consisted of. Due to the fact mine was all about Chelsea Fc, it was easy to know who to follow; I drew up a list of popular Chelsea accounts, and looked at who there followers were.

A main competitor I reviewed have over 238K followers. They used a blue and black type theme to match the clubs colours. They also have a website in their bio which has an opinion column, which i believe is a great idea as it has a sense of community and engagement with their followers.

E-commerce solution – Affiliate schemes:

The most effective way definitely would have been affiliate schemes. Unfortunately i wasn’t able to try it out myself for numerous reasons, for example I was in a different country for it (most were American). Affiliate schemes would benefit everyone attached to it as they can’t lose money, only gain. It’s easy to sign up for and install and works perfect for instagram. On top of that, it’s the best financial return with the most relevant products.

Some of the affiliate partners I looked at were:

If someone purchases an item through your link, you will get 10% of the sale.

Implementation:

The strategies were:

  • Blend in affiliate content with magazine style content
  • Use hashtags to engage relevant people
  • Encourage interactions from followers to keep them engaged
  • Follows & likes from celebrities

Content-wise I used poster-type images relating to Chelsea tied in with the world cup as the world cup at that time was a very big deal to most football fans. It gained a fair amount of likes with a respectable amount of interactions. As the captions, to encourage interactions, I would use challenging phrases such as, “Can you name the…” or “Who is the…”.

I also decided to test the concept of automation. Automation can be used so that you don’t have to follow, like and comment on peoples pages, instead just make a website do it. This method was definitely more efficient. I found it was pretty effective as the number of interactions it performed were increasing fairly quickly which invariably raked up my followers and likes, along with interactions from other people due to the websites comments. The service I used was called social drift, which gave a 3 day free trial, consequently it wasn’t performing to the highest standard; with a premium upgrade the rate was 50X faster.

Next steps:

I will continue to use and find affiliate schemes as they are by far the most effective way to monetise my page. A WordPress site is the next logical step, as this can promote my content to audiences outside Instagram, who would then have a chance of finding me too. This would then build more of a community for people who don’t have instagram as they could interact with the website instead. Advertising my own products could be good as I discover through testing, what types of products my audience want and what design would they respond to. When I achieve selling products in mass, dropshipping is an option as I don’t have to worry about them being returned or delivering them.

About me:

In the near future I would be considering a role in relevance to digital marketing; I know what people want and know how to get them to interact. I have also now had a weeks work experience with Usable Media and consequently got to know the office environment. Overmore, with this unique and beneficial week, I’ve added even more knowledge and experience on digital marketing.

Related Services

 
Digital Assessments
Branding & Design
Website Design & Build
Demand Generation
Hubspot
WordPress Security