The Social Media Marketing Book

Calls to Action

A call to action (CTA) is an invitation you make to your website visitors to engage in some type of action that benefits your business aims—and hopefully theirs, too. CTAs usually have one of two goals: stickiness and conversion. Sticky CTAs turn ephemeral waves of traffic into return visitors, whereas conversion-based CTAs lead a visitor into your sales funnel. The former will be accepted by most communities, and the latter should be approached more delicately to avoid the appearance of hucksterism.

Sticky CTAs

Social media campaigns often bring visitors in spikes that quickly dissipate; a video goes viral, or a blog post hits Digg's front page, and you get thousands of visitors for a few days. You want these people to stick around, become engaged with your content, and help promote the next home run.

If your content is hosted on your blog—as much of it should be—you have an easy option: feed and email subscriptions. Consider including invitations in your content: "If you liked this post, subscribe to our blog for more." Another possibility is to offer exclusive content—an ebook, for instance—to subscribers only.

Social media sites with networking functionality also give you the option to encourage your readers to connect with you there. Ask your visitors to follow you on Twitter, fan your page on Facebook, or subscribe to your channel on YouTube. Don't forget to cross-promote; tweet a link to your YouTube channel, and ask people to subscribe (see Figure 10-10).

Figure 10-11. A ...