Social media has made the world a global village, which comes with ways to make cool cash across different platforms. This fact holds whether you are an individual, a content creator, or a business person of whatever level.
If you are looking for how to make money on social media platforms, you are in the right place. Ensure you read this article to the end to learn the best ways to make money on social media.
7 Ways to Make Money on Social Media for Brands
Here are some proven tips to learn how to make money on social media as a brand owner, with little cost and minimal effort:
1. Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is when you leverage the content of an already-established publisher to earn money on the social media of your brand. However, it is best to sponsor a company that already targets the audience that aligns with your brand.
For example, it will look invasive for a skincare brand to sponsor a football jersey content. You want to ensure your marketing flows naturally instead of sounding like a boring advertisement.
Sponsoring content from other trusted sources has proven to give brands a 50 percent lift compared to brands who stick to their content alone.
2. Social Media Ads
As of 2022, over 4.59 billion people are actively using social media platforms. Thus, social media ads can increase your brand’s visibility to a broader audience. This lets you make money on social media by promoting your brand to many internet users.
The more clicks your content gets, the more you generate leads and conversions for your business. You can even use these social media ads to showcase your customers’ testimonials to gain the trust and loyalty of your potential customers.
3. Use Platform-Specific Monetization Programs
Popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter each have peculiar monetization schemes and tools. Making money from social media platforms like Facebook is possible, especially considering the platform generated over $113 billion in revenue through ads in 2022.
However, you must ensure you are eligible to enjoy these programs. For example, if you have up to 10,000 page followers on Facebook, you can earn social media income through in-stream ads on your videos.
Also, you can get paid for social media posts as a blogger using the Instant Articles feature.
4. Use An Affiliate Program
You can either be an affiliate marketer for other brands or launch an affiliate program for your brand’s products and services. This approach is a proven way to get paid off social media. No wonder the market grew from $ 5.5 billion in 2017 to about $ 8.2 billion in 2022.
There are many ways you’ll get paid as an affiliate marketer. However, the most common is the pay-per-sale method, where you get a commission for every product you can sell.
For example, Kathleen Lights included affiliate links and codes in the video description, guiding viewers to the products featured in the video.
5. Collaborate With Social Media Influencers
In a study, 58 percent of Gen Zs and 56 percent of millennials revealed that they purchased a product because of an influencer’s recommendation. When you collaborate with social media influencers or content creators, you leverage their large followership to provide exposure to your brand.
In collaborating with an influencer, you can pay them to create content to promote your brand. You can also partner with them to be your brand ambassador.
6. Sell Your Brand’s Products and Services
You can earn money with social media by using it as a social commerce platform for your products. Different online media allow you to use their platform as a virtual store so customers can buy from you directly.
Selling your products on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok helps you improve your reach to target customers using features like audience segmentation. Tools like Mandala AI also help to determine the platform that best suits your brand.
7. Boost Sales Using AI Chatbots
We are in a more advanced age where you can leverage chatbots to improve customer service and brand loyalty. In fact, studies have shown that 69 percent of clients were satisfied with the services of a chatbot.
Furthermore, 74% of customers prefer AI chatbots to resolve queries instead of real-life customer service agents.
7 Ways to Make Money on Social Media for Creators
Content creators are not left out of making money on social media. Check out these seven ways of monetizing social media for creators.
1. Sell Products on the Platform’s Commerce Features
You can start earning money on social media by selling your products using the commerce features available on social media platforms.
On a platform like Instagram, with over 2 billion monthly users as of January 2023, there is a large audience for you to reach. You only need to open a creator account to promote your products and make money with social media.
You can also monetize social media by making merch and other branded accessories to sell to your followers.
2. Brand Collaboration
Another approach on how to get paid on social media is to partner with other brands to sponsor their products. Many brands are usually ready to work with content creators and influencers, especially when you have good followership.
The global influencer market is estimated to be about $21.1 billion as of 2023 and is expected to increase over the years. When you collaborate with brands, you can help them connect better with their customers organically and bridge the gaps between their products and customers for an agreed payment.
3. Affiliate Marketing
One of its benefits is that you can passively generate revenue for yourself through its commission-based partnership. How to make money off social media here is by getting an affiliate link from your partner brand and including it on your social media account and posts.
You can also include it on other platforms, like your blog or newsletter, if you have one. Whenever a customer clicks your unique link and makes a purchase, you earn a set percentage of the revenue.
4. Sell Exclusive Content
As a content creator, an excellent social media monetization method is to make exclusive content for your followers. You can provide different pricing tiers for your subscribers to access special perks like training classes or behind-the-scenes activities.
For podcast creators, you can get paid social media subscribers offers like ad-free listening. Under this approach, you can leverage social media insights tools to know what your target audience wants so you can provide premium content for them.
5. Teach And Provide Consulting Services for Other Content Creators
You can help other creators on their journey by applying to teach people using a medium like Skillshare. Top creative teachers and Skillshare experts earn as much as $100,000+ annually.
You can also share your expertise through online platforms like Udemy and Teachable. Sticking to short and basic classes is best so your online students can quickly learn. On the other hand, if you prefer one-on-one consulting, you can share your idea with other upcoming content creators for an hourly consultation fee.
6. Content Syndication
Content syndication is an excellent way to reach a larger audience for your content via third-party sites that are more established. With this approach, your brand is published on a more prominent site in exchange for a byline or a fee.
The benefit of this method is that you’ll grow your audience and improve your recognition, eventually driving traffic back to your content. In an interview with Shopify Masters, officials from BestSelf.Co revealed how content syndication helped them gain over 3,000 subscribers within three weeks, through which they eventually raised more than $300,000.
7. Direct Advertising
The way this works is that you make clickable ads for a brand on your page or website. You’ll get paid whenever the brand you are advertising for gets successful clicks.
You can also include ads in your YouTube videos and earn money on social media whenever people view them. However, ensure that you only accept adverts that align with your content creator’s image so you do not damage your reputation.
Tips for Maximizing Income
It is possible to make money from social media. However, even the best strategies will only work if done correctly. Below are some other tips to keep in mind to ensure you get the best out of how to get paid from social media both as a brand and a content creator.
- Create engaging content to have a positive and long-lasting relationship with your audience.
- Post consistently to build and retain interaction with your followers.
- Use tools like Mandala AI to track social media performance to keep your audience satisfied.
- Use multiple media platforms to diversify your efforts to reach a larger audience.
- Implement social media design trends that will keep your followers captivated.
Mastering the Social Media Riches
There is no particular best way to make money on social media because different people will have unique situations.
As an individual, an influencer, or a brand, you must be clear on how people make money on social media. Thankfully, you can now use one or more of the strategies learned to discover the one(s) that work best to get paid on social media.
We have various social media platforms today. As such, it is best practice to diversify your content so you can monetize your presence on as many platforms as possible.
Try out Mandala AI’s 15-day free trial if you need a tool that can guide you on how to monetize social media across various platforms to reach your goals.