This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a china inspection service company. He also consults for a neon sign store that offers custom outdoor neon signs.

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By Lior Levin

You may have noticed that many businesses and bloggers list the number of subscribers to their websites in a tracking box, or they include social media share counts underneath their posts. It’s easy to find out which posts are popular very quickly, but they also serve as part of a larger trend to help build trust about the content on a site.

Social media provides many tools that help marketers, businesses, and bloggers persuade readers to become repeat visitors and eventually customers. Here are six tips for effectively persuading visitors with social media:
 

1. Give Customers Power for Influence

Given the right tools, a customer can provide the most influential endorsement for your products or business. Copywriter Barry Feldman shares that his line of work may not be the most effective way to persuade customers to make decisions. He offers the following list of statistics to consider:

• 54 percent of U.S. adults identified old-fashioned Word of Mouth as the most important influencer of purchase decisions. (Source: 2011 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report by Experian)

• 62 percent of people trust reviews from friends, family and colleagues. (Lightspeed Research 2011)

• 56 percent trust reviews from other consumers. (Lightspeed Research 2011)

• 60 percent of shoppers said online reviews were more significant than traditional media, in-store employees and social networking. (Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group study, 2011)

While marketers can still provide relevant, truthful information that is worth sharing, one of the most important aspects of social media marketing persuasion is providing simple ways for customers to provide feedback, and to then make it easy to find what other customers have written.

Make customer reviews easy to find on your site. Provide simple ways for customers to share your pages on social media. And do your best to respond to any complaints about your products on social media. If you provide simple, accessible ways for customers to talk about you, they may end up writing the best marketing copy for you—for free.
 

2. Use Giveaways to Persuade Customers

Effectively persuading customers might require more effort on the front end in order to convince them to give your product a shot. How do you capture a reader’s attention on a search page or even on your own homepage? The most popular way to draw in new customers is to first offer them a free item that’s useful.

Kevin Klau suggests, “The most common things to give away are eBooks that contain secrets and shortcuts to a successful marketing campaign, brand building or SEO – something that helps them get ahead of the competition. It would be even more persuasive if you are giving them something top secret or exclusive to site members.”

Giving away a product or knowledge grabs the attention of customers and can make trying your product or business irresistible. If you’ve truly created a product or service that will fill the need of your customers, then giving it away will help persuade them to keep coming back to pay for it.
 

3. Commit to Engaging Your Readers on Social Media

One of the strengths of social media is immediate engagement with potential customers. A business using social media for marketing can’t use it as a one-way tunnel. It’s always a two-way street where customers are expecting a certain level of interaction with businesses.

Copywriter Jeff Sexton shares at the Social Media Examiner, “Commit to consistent engagement on the social media platforms you chose to use, to the point of staying away from new social media platforms that you don’t have the resources to actively participate in.”

Not only could you lose customers if you ignore them, you could make an enemy who generates bad press for your company or brand.
 

4. Tell a Good Story

A good story will help customers become passionate about your product, places them in a narrative that they care about, and helps them better understand the need for your product. A good story typically involves a hero who overcomes obstacles in order to reach a desired goal. As a marketer, it’s your job to translate the experience of the customer into that narrative.

What could a story look like? One of the most common stories we see on television is a mother who struggles to keep her home clean and orderly amidst food-dropping husbands or dirt-tracking kids. The quick and simple solution is often a cleaning product that helps her restore order to the home. However, if you provide tax advice, the narrative could be a stressed out small business owner who finds peace of mind through your company.
 

5. Build Trust to Persuade Customers

When customers encounter your business or brand, the deciding factor that determines what they do will be whether they trust you. Have you demonstrated your expertise and communicated the awards your company has won? Do your graphics create a professional feel?

Mashable suggests the following parameters for trust: “If you’ve ever published a book or built a successful company, you are considered an authority. Developed an app? You are an expert.”

Share your accomplishments and awards with customers, letting them know that you have credible and recognized experience in your field.

When moving potential customers from awareness to acceptance, trust building makes the difference according to Suzanne Vara at Social Media Today. She writes, “Trust is a big factor when they consider the propensity to buy. If you offer the lowest price, should people be skeptical? If you offer the highest price, is what you are providing the best of the best?”

If you offer the best price for sneakers, you need to also demonstrate a proven track record with customers and among your peers in the business community.

6. Analyze Your Progress

If you want to persuade customers, then you need to set up at least quarterly reviews that enable you to track your effectiveness at driving conversions. Are you persuading customers to take action toward the right products?

Social media manager Pam Sahota writes at Social Media Today: “You should be regularly analyzing how much traffic and leads you’re generating from each social platform you’re participating in as well as how valuable it is. This will allow your team to evaluate its efforts and make adjustments if needed. For instance, you may want to spend more time engaging the community that tends to convert into more qualified leads.”

If you’re effective at persuading customers, then your sales should show a return on your social media investment. Flat or dipping sales will indicate that you need to explore other ways to persuade and engage your customers.

For example, perhaps you’ve been trying to convince business owners that you have the most creative website designs when they really just want something that’s simple and functional. When customers don’t take action, that’s a clue to try another avenue of persuasion.

Social media provides quick and simple ways to connect with your customers. However, before you jump into the social networking game, make sure you have a clear strategy for connecting with customers, processing feedback, and effectively creating an environment of trust.

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

Retailers are missing where the customers REALLY are on Facebook. Are you? http://ow.ly/9saIt

Too many authors give up after only 1 publisher rejects their title. Big mistake. Here’s why. http://ow.ly/9uoJu

The very best way to receive a LinkedIn recommendation. http://ow.ly/9upsl

4 things your blog must do. [Slideshow, excellent reminders] http://ow.ly/9x5ey

12 signs you’re still a tech dinosaur. http://ow.ly/9vTg4

Another major change coming down the pike on Facebook. [Stop already!] http://ow.ly/9uoTu

Are you brave enough to use this research trick when pitching journalists? Or does this pitch creep you out? http://ow.ly/9saYk

Seven Reasons Your Content Marketing Needs a Brand Journalist | MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog http://ow.ly/9x5w1

Billionaire creator of Spanx explains how she built an empire out of erasing women’s panty lines. [Video] http://ow.ly/9x8PH

7 social media pitfalls for nonprofits. http://ow.ly/9xpXU

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

How entrepreneurs decide how to post on LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter. http://ow.ly/8MvYM

4 easy tactics for becoming a must-follow account on Twitter.  http://ow.ly/8MHte

5 Ways Writers Can Break Out of the Tired Old Social Media Box.  http://ow.ly/8Mxlx

How to keep your face out of LinkedIn ads. http://ow.ly/8Mw6j

Don’t create your next info-product until you watch this cool video that explains a smart 5-step system. http://ow.ly/8Onwp

13 Ways To Get More Traffic & Publicity From Slideshare. http://ow.ly/8OA68

Top 30 PR Do’s and Don’ts. http://ow.ly/8OzE4

18-point checklist for proofreaders. http://ow.ly/8PTc9

Press Release Tip: Always include a strong call to action & explain EXACTLY what you want people to do (click, call, write…)

The Inside Scoop on Using Twitter Lists for Profit and Sanity http://ow.ly/8Rgbr

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

Prevent the “lago effect” from dooming your CEO who tries to “help” during a crisis. http://paper.li/clayedwardspr/pr-pros-paper

How Restaurants Are Using Social Media to Their Advantage. http://tinyurl.com/8xbuyuo

How to Use Great Testimonials, Once You Get Them. http://ow.ly/8b2LS

Get Blog Results for Business | Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad | Writing On The Web. http://tinyurl.com/7dzodzr

Top 50 Women Entrepreneur Experts to Follow on Twitter. http://ow.ly/8dj2U

Nice year-end gift for your clients. Free ebook with 2 dozen publicity/social media tips. http://ow.ly/8dj8Z

5 clever uses of LinkedIn’s brand new “group polls” feature. http://ow.ly/8dkJL

5-part strategy for cashing in on content and social media marketing in 2012. http://ow.ly/8dTU6

Freelancers: Pick up some extra cash in 2012. Pitch articles to these paying markets. http://ow.ly/8dUTu

Authors: Compare major print-on-demand companies. http://ow.ly/8dV2u

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

PR Pros: When you write a press release, do you share it on social media sites? Experts disagree. http://ow.ly/8486v

15 magnets to help you capture & convert leads at your website. http://ow.ly/83XYg 

Heading To a Trade Show in 2012? 5 Tips for Getting the Most ROI Out Of Your Event: http://ow.ly/859iM

Retailers: 17 ways to use Twitter to engage your audience. [No excuse not to tweet!] http://ow.ly/83UdR

Publicity Tip: Readers LOVE year-end lists, like this one, The 50 Best Workout Songs of the Year. http://ow.ly/83RUZ 

The Essential word List for Lazy PR Writers.http://ow.ly/859s3 

5 ways to master the new Facebook timeline. http://ow.ly/86rsi 

When Business Blogging Works Too Well… | Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad http://bit.ly/ukgnlr

Do you have a form at your website? Add this clever tool to encourage people to promote you: http://ow.ly/85fX7

Local news outlets among Google’s most-searched terms:  http://ow.ly/85ath

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.
    
How to improve your Facebook marketing for the holidays
http://ow.ly/7DjbU 
     
    
50 tools that can help you write
http://ow.ly/7BtSv
     
    
The care and feeding of the press: Super tips from the Internet Press Guild
http://ow.ly/7BtCU
     
    
Publicity Tip: Contact a media outlet that already covered you & suggest a “follow up story” to the original one
     
    
6 tips for making your press release Twitter-friendly
http://ow.ly/7AqL8
     
    
Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. ~William Arthur Ward
     
     
10 words that can help or hurt your click-through rate on Twitter.
http://ow.ly/7xNfu RT @DanZarrella [Testing is powerful]
    
    
Social bookmarking tips to pull traffic to your blog or website
http://ow.ly/7BzRk

      
 ”I love Thanksgiving turkey. It’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.” ~Arnold Schwarzenegger
     
    
6 ways to help people find your press releases
 http://ow.ly/7FkmY 

Do you already follow me, but you’d like to read tweets about certain PR, publicity and social media topics? Which ones?

Do you hate recording talking-head videos as much as I do?

There. I’ve said it. I hate recording talking-head videos!

Here’s why.

Before I can hit the “record” button, I must:

• Clean my home office. This includes ripping all the inspirational post-its and to-do notes from the walls, scooping up papers, notebooks, periodicals and other junk from my desk and throwing it into a pile in the corner. The coffee cups go into the kitchen sink.
• Drag out my big wooden ladder so I can clip one of the lights onto the side of it.
• Look for the blue gel sheets that I attach to the lights with wooden clothes pins.
•  Search for the damn clothes pins.
• Retrieve my tripod from the closet, set it up and attach the camera, then reposition it until it’s perfect.
• Wash and style my hair.
• Paint my face.
• Find something decent to wear.
• Tape my talking points to the wall behind the camera.

All That—BEFORE I Can Practice

Only then can I start recording a few dry runs.

When I’m done recording, I rip everything down and put the office back together again.

So why bother at all with these videos?

Because I can upload them to my YouTube channel. Videos are one of the most powerful ways to pull traffic. They’re terrific for offering free content.

They help people know more about me. They’re one of the hottest, most powerful marketing tools. And they’re essential for a PR campaign.

Anybody who doesn’t use video is leaving money on the table. (Nonprofits, this includes you!)

But why go through all this trouble and make shooting video harder than it has to be?

Enough is Enough

Last night, I decided to turn a small corner of my dirty apple cellar in my basement into a video studio. I can set up the equipment once and everything stays in place forever. When it’s time to record a video, all I have to do is gussy up, run downstairs, turn on the lights and start recording.

Here’s where you come in. I need your help turning part of this room, which you’d expect to find in the Addams Family basement, into an attractive setting for videos that are good enough for the corporate world. I want to shoot against this wall which is fine for Lurch and Uncle Fester, but not much else:

Calling it an apple cellar is a bit of a stretch. The 18-by-8 room is filled with remnants of aluminum siding and carpeting from the previous owner. It’s littered with pieces of broken wooden chairs.

I need to sweep up small piles of gravel and sand from the floor. A big oak table holds about a dozen paint cans, paint supplies, blankets and other junk:

The sturdy walls, made of large stones held together with grouting, keep out the noise. But they’re not a pretty backdrop.

Let’s Have Fun with This

What can I put against the stone wall? Suggestions for furniture? Silk flowers in a vase? I dislike silk flowers but don’t want to run out and buy a fresh bouquet every time I shoot.

I’ll also be sharing my progress, with video and photos, on the social media sites to prove that if I can do it, so can you. All you need is a small space, some fairly inexpensive equipment and the creative ideas of other Publicity Hounds like you.

I don’t need professional staging or interior decorating advice because I want to keep it simple. And I want to be able to buy what I need from the local thrift shops.

So have at it, Hounds.  I’m on a tight budget and need your ideas on how to really spruce up the place.

If you’re on Twitter, Twitter has assigned you a “reputation score.”

It has a system in place to gauge who you follow and who the people you follow follow.  It uses that information to suggest the “Who to Follow” avatars in the right-hand column of your profile.

So far, your score is still a secret.  So why am I mentioning it?

Because I’m betting that Twitter will make it public very soon—simply because so many other sites are starting to score and grade us. At a tech conference last year, Twitter’s CEO said he’d like to see the Twitter scores visible to everyone.
     
    

Who Else Brands, Scores & Grades You

• If you’re on Klout.com, you have a score, from 0 to 100, largely determined by how often you tweet. You’re also “branded” with a one- or two-word description like networker, celebrity, thought leader or curator. Klout calls these its classes. 
    
• Influencer Exchange, the new subscription-based software program that has a 14-day free trial I’ve been promoting, assigns a score to influencers in any one of thousands of niches, depending on who’s discussing them in traditional media or social media, and how important those people are.  You can read more about Influencer Exchange here.
    
• On Quora, the question and answer site, users “vote up” or “vote down” your answers.
    
• On Yelp, readers grade restaurants, stores, nightclubs and even the local furnace repair guys with reviews of from one to five stars. 
      
• Facebook doesn’t assign you a score, but how often you interact with your friends, and those who have Liked your pages, determines how often the information you share shows up in their news feeds.
    
• On Google, our websites are ranked, depending on a variety of factors such as how many other influential websites link to us, and how much content we provide.  
      

How Your Score Might be Used

I can’t help but envision all of us eventually having our online scores seered onto the flesh on our hips with a hot branding iron.

The score could eventually determine if we’re the top candidate for a job, or we get a lucrative consulting contract, or a reporter from the New York Times calls us for an interview because we have a higher score than the other dozen or so people the reporter researched.

Do you know about other sites that score, grade or brand users?  How do you think these sites will be used? And how much weight will people put on a reputation score? Are these “grading” systems missing more important things like a blog, the number of comments at a blog, and how often the blogger responds?
      
    
Tools That Can Help You:

Twitter for Beginners: A Step-by-Step, Can’t-Fail System for Experts and Influencers (and Those Who Want to Be) 

Dr. Karen Hoving of Aurora, Colo., writes:

“I have a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and specialize in two areas: Bipolar Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Here’s what I’m doing right now to market myself:

• A Facebook page.
    
• A website.  
    
• Two blogs: The Couch Trip for general psychology and “Shrinking” Chronic Illness.
    
• A monthly newsletter (with only 11 subscribers–sigh).
    
• A Twitter account.
    
• A LinkedIn profile (but am not terribly active)

“I share different information on each site. 

“Here’s my question: Do shrinks get patients via social media marketing? I am doing a lot and watching all of the videos you and others send. But often, people are trying to sell something onlne. I am trying to sell ME—my services and education, and my time. 

“Can this be marketed on sites like Facebook and Twitter? If so, how? Marketing for therapists is different than marketing for someone selling widgets.”

“If social media won’t work for me—and I’m willing to be patient—I don’t want to waste a lot of time.”

Why is it that some people have so much trouble generating interest in their Facebook pages? Yet other people, like Mari Smith, one of the world’s foremost experts on Facebook, seem to have a big pot of glue that they slather onto their pages and capture whoever happens to stop by?

Mari’s glue is in the form of interesting videos, status updates that tip off fans to other people’s how-to articles about Facebook and Internet marketing, and compelling polls and surveys.

She promotes other people’s webinars, teleseminars and products that she thinks her fans will find valuable. And she sparks lively discussions that make readers stick like glue to the page and, often, participate.

Mari does something else that keeps those fans coming back for more—and this is the page’s real value.

Almost every day, she answers people’s questions about Facebook and a variety of other topics. Sometimes the same questions keep popping up. And she keeps giving the answers.

She travels the world, speaking at conferences and working with corporate clients. When she’s away, she recruits someone else to answer questions for her.

Need to contact Facebook about a knotty problem? Mari leads readers her directory of more than 120 forms for contacting Facebook.

Confused about the best webinar service to use for your own webinars? Or other products and services? She shares her recommendations for vendors, and explains why.

And what about those unlucky souls who appeal to her when they try to log onto their Facebook pages, but the pages seem to have vanished into thin air? She has linked, many times, to the blog post I wrote on 5 things to do if your Facebook fan page disappears.

Befuddled by all those Facebook apps and how to use them?  Mari is standing by, ready to help.

Is it any wonder she has amassed more than 43,000 fans?

That’s why I’ve invited her to be my guest guest on a webinar at 4 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow, June 29, on The Best Ways to Attract Facebook Fans, Provide Sterling Content and Keep Them Coming Back for More (Just Like the Celebrities Do).

If the time is inconvenient for you, register anyway, because you’ll get the link to the video replay within 48 hours.

She will discuss a wide variety of topics, including the value of a Welcome page, when to use Facebook ads, how to use email to generate Likes, tagging, autographing and more.

I’ve asked her to address the topic of Facebook contests and the rules that govern what you can and cannot do.

Join us! Register here, and bring your questions.