How to Write Effective CTAs on Social Media: A Guide for Marketers. Do you recall the last time you were compelled to sign up for a free one-month trial or download a guide? That was an effective call to action, or a CTA. A good CTA can do wonders in the marketing world—it can drive more visitors to your content, generate sales, and increase leads and conversion rates. What is a CTA? These CTAs are simple but will tell you a lot about how engaged your audience is. A good CTA with a clear value proposition answers the question, “What’s in it for me?” 4. Make it easy for your followers to get in touch Contact us’ and similar phrases tell people you’re open to communicating with them. Trust—When it comes to subscription services, there’s a common fear that once you’ve committed by signing up, that you’re trapped. No matter what action you’re hoping to drive with your social media posts Hootsuite can help.
Do you recall the last time you were compelled to sign up for a free one-month trial or download a guide? Remember that?
That was an effective call to action, or a CTA.
A good CTA can do wonders in the marketing world—it can drive more visitors to your content, generate sales, and increase leads and conversion rates.
What is a CTA?
A CTA prompts the reader to do something—sign up for a subscription, download an e-book, attend an event, click for more information, and so on.
Where does a CTA live? A CTA is most commonly found at the end of blog posts or the bottom of a website page, but they can also be sprinkled throughout a site or included in social media messages.
It’s about providing your reader with an actionable task, most often appearing as a button, in-text link, or an image. To keep things simple, a CTA provides direction towards the next step and it should answer the question “Now what?”
Why you need to learn how to write effective CTAs
The greatest value a CTA can provide a business is, well, providing more business. In the digital realm, more business usually means more clicks, sales, and engagement. CTAs are especially useful because they are trackable—switching up a few words or the placement of your CTA can dramatically affect analytics.
For example, when SAP switched their CTAs to orange, this boosted their conversion rate by more than 32.5 percent. Because they’re measurable, when you play around and test CTAs, it also gives you insight into your audience and their behavior.
Even if you’re not looking to collect specific data, CTAs can help you reach an objective by simply asking your reader to do it. When you regularly request that your readers do something—share, reply, Retweet, contact me—it gives your content purpose.
Instead of just provoking warm fuzzy feelings about your last post, readers are urged to take action and engage with your brand further.
We’ve combed through research and sat down with Hootsuite’s resident CTA expert and senior copywriter—Ric Mazereeuw—for the low-down on the best practices for crafting an effective CTA for social media.
13 tips for writing effective CTAs for social media
CTAs have been around since the dawn of print marketing—but social hasn’t. And yet, the two go hand-in-hand. The way a CTA asks something of your audience, how it directly speaks to and engages your reader, and how it triggers a response from a user—there’s an inherent social aspect to it.
If you’re on any platform, you’ve probably seen one already, asking you to share, reply, Retweet, contact us, etc. These CTAs are simple but will tell you a lot about how engaged your audience is.
In fact, on Twitter Salesforce found that brands asking for Retweets (a simple social media CTA), received responses in droves. Those who asked for a ‘RT’ received 10 times more Retweets and those that spelled out the word ‘Retweet’ received 23 times more.
Asking your followers to share or reply is an excellent way to discover just how many people are listening, keeping tabs on your content, and interested in what you have to say. With the amount of content circling the interwebs, if you can get a customer to take the time to share some feedback, then you know they’re engaged.
1. Customize CTAs for each platform
Each platform works a little differently when it comes to CTAs. On Facebook Pages, where business ads come by the dozen, there are CTA buttons that are clickable and trackable. Instagram has followed suit by adding their own CTA buttons at the end of their sponsored posts as well. Twitter actually did a study on the most effective CTAs found on their platform, ranked them, and provided a pro…
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