This one picks up where “What is List Building All About?” left off. You don’t need to read that first, though it helps if list building is new to you.
Social media will feed your email list all day long once it’s set up properly. The catch is that the platforms keep moving the furniture. Some of the old tricks quietly stopped working while better ones opened up, and plenty of business owners are still running the 2019 playbook. Here is what works right now.
Put A Sign Up Button On Your Facebook Page
The old advice was to turn your Facebook cover photo into an ad for your lead magnet and drop the sign up link in the photo description. That one only half works now. You can still write a description on the cover photo, but Facebook no longer makes links in that description clickable, so someone would have to copy and paste it into a browser. Almost nobody will.
The replacement is better anyway. Your Page gets an action button that sits right under the cover photo, and you choose where it goes. Set it to Sign Up and point it at your opt-in page. Facebook walks through the steps in its help article on Page action buttons.
Then let the cover photo do the part it’s still good at, which is showing the offer. Put the lead magnet and one short line of copy into the image itself so the button underneath has something explaining it. We covered several other ways to work a Page in 5 Pro Facebook Strategies For Local Business Growth.
Run A Lead Ad So Nobody Has To Leave The App
Facebook ads are still an affordable way to add subscribers, and lead ads are the version built for exactly this job. Someone taps your ad, a form opens inside Facebook or Instagram with their name and email already filled in from their profile, and they’re on your list without ever leaving the app. There is no landing page to load and nothing to bounce off of.
You set it up in Meta Ads Manager. The objective you want is Leads, and the conversion location is Instant Forms. If you learned this back when the objective was called Lead Generation, it’s the same thing under a new name. Meta explains the form settings in its guide to lead ads with instant forms.
One choice inside that form matters more than the rest. Meta offers a More Volume form and a Higher Intent form. More Volume is faster to complete, so you collect more signups. Higher Intent adds a review step where the person confirms their details, so you collect fewer signups from people who actually meant to give you their address. For list building I lean Higher Intent. A smaller list that opens your email is worth more than a big list that never does.
Use All Five Link Slots In Your Instagram Bio
For years you had one link in your bio, which meant picking between your booking page and your opt-in. That rule is gone. Instagram now lets you add up to five links in your bio, each with its own title, and you can drag them into the order you want.
Make one of them your opt-in and put it first. Name the thing people get rather than the format it arrives in. “Free 10 minute pricing checklist” tells someone what they’re about to receive. “Newsletter” tells them they’re about to receive email, which isn’t a benefit anyone is looking for.
Put A Link Sticker On Your Stories
This one used to be locked behind 10,000 followers, and a lot of business owners still believe it is. Instagram opened link stickers up to every account back in 2021. If you have an Instagram account, you can put a tappable link on a Story today, no follower count required.
You get one link sticker per slide, so use the slide to earn the tap. Show the problem, show the thing you made that solves it, then put the sticker on the last frame. Stories expire in 24 hours, and that is why this one keeps working. You can run the same three slide sequence every week without anyone feeling like you’re repeating yourself.
Give People A Reason To Hand Over Their Email
Every trick above moves someone from a social platform to a form. None of them make that person want to fill it out. That part is your offer, and it’s the part most people skip.
The offers that work are specific and small. A one page cheat sheet answering the question your customers ask you every single week beats the word “newsletter”, because it names a problem the reader already knows is theirs. If you aren’t sure what yours should be, start with how to create the ultimate lead magnet for your business.
Send The Traffic To A Page With One Job
Social traffic arrives distracted. Drop someone on your home page and they will have a look around and leave. Send them to a page with one headline and one form. There is no menu and no sidebar pulling them toward something other than the thing you just promised them.
Turn on double opt-in while you’re in there, so the addresses you collect are addresses that exist. It costs you a few subscribers on the way in and saves you from a list full of typos and throwaway accounts. Here is what double opt-in is and why it matters.
Start With One
Don’t try to set up all six of these this week. Pick the Facebook action button. It takes about five minutes and it keeps working every day after that. Once it’s live, add the Instagram bio link. Then the link sticker.
If you want another set of eyes on where your website and your social profiles are losing people, I’m happy to take a look. You get back the specific things to fix, in plain language, not a score out of 100.
How are you using social media to grow your list? Leave a comment below and let me know.
Very interesting, thanks for the tip!
Sure thing, Martha!