You’ve spent years of hard work growing your social media following, but what would happen if your account was shut down tomorrow? In today’s digital marketing landscape, you don’t own your social media following, but you do own your email and SMS subscriber lists — this is one of the many reasons why converting your social media followers to subscribers is so crucial. In this strategy guide, we’ll discuss 3 different ways to convert your social media followers into loyal subscribers so that you can create and maintain lasting relationships with them, on your terms. One of the most common ways that businesses passively convert social media followers is by directing them to a link in their bio. This is especially easy if you use an app to host multiple different URLs on one landing page (such as Bitly, Linktree, Feedlink, etc.). We recommend creating a Privy Landing Page to link in your bio — this will take your social media traffic straight to a signup form with no distractions. Collect email, SMS, and any other custom fields (if needed). Here’s an example from Truly Lifestyle Brand’s Instagram page:
Add a button on your Landing Page’s Thank You Page that redirects signups to your website.

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URL Targeted Displays

Privy can identify traffic coming to your site from different referral sources. That being said, you can target your popups based on whether your contacts are coming from Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, and any other social media platforms that your store sees traffic pouring in from. To achieve this:
  • Create a display and head to the display’s Settings.
  • Click on your Audience Targeting card.
  • Add a new targeting condition.
    • Under Property, choose Referring URL.
    • Under Operator, choose contains.
    • Under Value, type in the domain of the social media you’d like to target, such as, instagram, facebook, or tiktok.
  • Save your changes and Publish when you’re ready.
A visitor’s Referring URL reflects the page they were on immediately before viewing the current page — it can be internal (from your own website) or external (from sources outside of your site, i.e., social media).
The best part about using Audience Targeting is that it gives you an opportunity to show different messages and offers to different people — we recommend tweaking your popup’s creative, copy, and/or incentive based on the social media audience you’re targeting.
You can create Custom Segments of contacts who signed up for this specific display, as well as launch a Welcome Flow specific to this display’s signups. This allows you to fully customize their journey from the minute they join your list.

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Stories and Highlights

A more active approach to converting your social media followers to email and SMS subscribers is by posting to your stories and/or creating story highlights that link to either a Landing Page and/or your website (with a URL Targeted Display). Here’s an example from Starface, to give you an idea of what this could look like: You can incentivize your story viewers to sign up for:
  • Early access to an upcoming sale
  • A sneak peek of an upcoming launch
  • The chance to win a free item
  • Weekly recipes, style guides, etc.
Posting these sorts of stories regularly will help you gain more followers as loyal subscribers.