12 Expert Ways to Grow Your Mailing List Using Social Media
/Social media is our world. It’s a niche that we feel at home in, because we’ve built two brands from the ground up primarily through the use of social media. As online business owners, social media is vital for spreading content around the internet. However, there’s one thing that we consider way more important than our social media presence, and that’s our mailing list.
In this post, we’ll explain why a mailing list is the most important feature of your business, and how you can reliably build your list by using four popular social media platforms.
You do not own your social media
Ok, so this might be pretty obvious, but you don’t own your social media accounts. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc reserve the rights to your account. You don’t want to rely solely on a platform (or platforms) that you don’t have any ownership of to conduct business.
Kendra and I have heard absolute horror stories of things that can wrong on social media. From people getting mysteriously locked out of their profiles, profiles simply vanishing, accounts being hijacked by spam bots, or entire groups (like Facebook groups) disappearing and never returning. Unfortunately, things of this nature do happen. And it’s devastating when it happens in business!
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But, you do own your mailing list
Your mailing list is 100% yours! As long as you are sending emails lawfully (cliff notes version: including a valid physical address, not sending spam or unsolicited emails), you don’t have anything to worry about. Your list is more valuable than you social media following, hands down!
In order for someone to give you their email address, chances are they’re extremely interested in you/your brand and/or whatever free material you’re offering (ideally, both instances would be true!).
Your subscribers are likely to be the people that care the most about your brand and are the most interested in your products/services, so taking the time to build your list will pay off (literally). Now, let’s discuss some great ways to build your list on four popular social networks.
**Note, for the remainder of the post, we’re writing as if you already have a mailing list and have created an incentive (or opt-in or content upgrade) for your list. If you haven’t, you can find out more information regarding list building from these posts: The Importance of Building a Mailing List, The Best Email Marketing Service for Beginners, and Help, I Don’t Know What to Send My Subscribers!
How to Grow Your List With Facebook
If you have a Facebook page for your blog or business, you could make the header an image that promotes your favorite/best performing content upgrade so that even casual visitors to your page can turn into subscribers.
You could create a post on your Facebook page that describes your content upgrade and provides a link to either a landing page or the blog post containing that content upgrade. Here’s an example of how we “pinned” the post advertising our latest content upgrade on our page.
If you participate in Facebook groups, you could promote your content upgrade in relevant promo threads (please, don’t spam the group wall).
If you’re browsing Facebook groups to see if you can answer any questions and show off your expertise (which we highly recommend that you do), you can solve someone’s problem by linking to a content upgrade, (just like you would if a blog post answered their question) if applicable. The awesome thing about this technique is that more often than not, other members in the group will sign up too, not just the person who asked the question.
Building Your List With Instagram
Create a post of your content upgrade and encourage your followers to sign up for it.
Post a preview of your content upgrade in Instagram Stories! We recently tried this and got a great result!
Link your favorite/best performing content upgrade in your bio with a call to action encouraging your followers to download it.
Growing Your List With Twitter
Change the link in your bio to a link of your landing page or a blog post containing an opt-in. Include a call to action.
Regularly tweet out links to your landing pages and blog posts containing content upgrades.
Building Your List With Pinterest
Quick note here! Pinterest is largely responsible for the size of our mailing list. It’s not only a powerhouse when it comes to driving traffic to our blog, but it has been instrumental in the growth of our mailing list.
Create pins of your blog posts containing opt-ins and your landing pages, and share these strategically to group boards.
Include a link to an opt-in in your profile. Here’s how we have our Pinterest profile setup. Notice there’s two links. With a Pinterest business account, your website’s domain automatically appears in your profile, and you can’t switch it out for a different link.
These are some of our favorite ways to utilize social media to easily grow your mailing list. It’s never too late to begin working on your list, so don’t feel bad if you haven’t started! How have you been using social media to grow your mailing list? Let us know in the comments below!
P.S. Are you an entrepreneur in the health and wellness industry struggling to land clients? Then you’ll want to check out our free video series, 5 Days to Consistent Clients!
